September 30, 2001 - December 24, 2001
Racism and Genocide against Africoids In West Papua and Melanesia
Posted: Monday, December 24, 2001
By Nubiyang
After Africa, Asia has the largest population of people of African descent. That number is about 500,000,000 (five hundred million people) who belong to the two branches of the Black race. One branch is the Negroid Branch composed of Africans, Americas-Africans, Afro-Europeans, Melanesians, Papuans, Agta of the Philipines, Fijians-New Caledonians and other Melanesians.
The other group are also of the Negroid African race and consist of the Black Dalit and Black Tribals of India (see http://dalitstan.org ), as well as Australian Aboriginals. In the case of Australian Aboriginals, studies show their origins to be in the Sahara and East Africa, where people who look exactly like them, such as the Tibbou, still exist.
Today, Blacks in East Timor, SE Asia, West Papua, Australia and Melanesia as well as the Indian Ocean Islands are being systematically oppressed and exterminated or wiped out. THE ATROCITIES COMMITTED AGAINST AFRICOIDS IN MELANESIA IS PART OF A POLICY CALLED THE "ASIANIZATION PROGRAM," WHERE ALL BLACKS AND EVENTUALLY AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND WHITES, CHINESE AND OTHERS LIVING IN PLACES LIKE INDONESIA ARE TO BE ELIMINATED AND THE LANDS OF BLACKS TAKEN OVER BY THE MALAYS OF INDONESIA ( see www.westpapua.net ) www.koteka.net www.gn.apc.org/tapol
Many of us who look around and see seas of Black faces may feel secure, but when we look at the Black Negro population around the world, we are being eliminated from many parts of the world and our aboriginal lands are being taken. India was the first land where Blacks were systematically exterminated and their lands taken by force. TODAY, BLACKS IN INDIA, BLACK UNTOUCHABLES...ARE THE MOST OPPRESSED PEOPLE ON EARTH. See http://dalitstan.org Yet, once in history, the entire India, Pakistan and Afghanistan region, Sri Lanka, Burma and Thiland...were dominated By Black races and Black culture. Today, Blacks are a a much lesser population.
GENOCIDE OF BLACKS IN SUDAN, MAURITANIA AND NORTHERN AFRICA
The same scheme of genocide and land theft taking place in West Papua, Melanesia, Australia and Indonesia agains Black Africoids is also happening in Sudan, Mauritania and northern Africa, where Semites are committing genocide against Black Africans.
Nubia-Kush (Sudan) was and still is the sacred and HOLY LANDS OF THE BLACK RACE, it was there that Black civilization began and spread to the rest of Africa and the world. Yet today, the Nubas, Dinkas and other PURE AFRICAN SUDANESE ARE BEING ELIMINATED BY THE CHILDREN AND HENCHMEN OF ARABS, WHO LIKE THE INDONESIANS, WANT TO CONQUER ALL AFRICA, EXTERMINATE ALL AFRICANS AND CONVERT THE REST TO ARAB CULTURE.
Africans around the world are very aware of these IMPERIALIST SCHEMES BY THE MALAYS OF INDONESIA AND THE ARABS IN THEIR ATTEMPT TO TAKE OVER THE LANDS OF BLACKS, WHILE PRETENDING TO BE "BROTHERS" OF THE SAME BELIEF.
Hence, it is the duty of all Africans to unite in working to create a strong BLACK AFRICAN SUPERPOWER THAT WILL SUPPORT AND HELP ESTABLISH STRONG BLACK NATIONS IN VARIOUS PARTS OF THE WORLD.
Like one Senegalese Leader of the sixties and seventies who supported the Liberation Movements against Portugese and Indonesian imperialism and genocide against Blacks in East Timor and Papua, we Africans should return to that policy and support our brothers and sisters in the Black lands of SE ASIA AND THE PACIFIC. WE SHOULD NOT TOLERATE ANY FORM OF GENOCIDE, WHETHER IT IS IN AFRICA OR IN MELANESIA. WE SHOULD BE UNITED SO THAT WE CAN DEVELOP A CULTURAL, ECONOMIC AND MILITARY POWERBLOCK ON A WORLDWIDE SCALE (See the Great book, "Susu Economics: The History of Pan-African Trade, Commerce, Money and Wealth," published by 1stBooks Library, 2595 Vernal Pike, Bloomington, Indiana U.S.A 47404 Also see "A History of the African-Olmecs," email; 1stBooks@1stbooks.com www.1stbooks.com See previews of all works at www.barnesandnoble.com
This is a very good book about West African trade, commerce and the development of civilization in Mexico, the Southern U.S. AND South America thousands of years before Christopher Columbus.
The economic, social and military power of Blacks over this world is rather huge. However, the Semites (Arabs) and Europeans, as well as Malays are deviding us by using religions and religious beliefs. Yet, not a single Arab nation is devided when it comes to protecting their group, their lands or customs. Not a single Asian nation is devided. WE BLACKS, WHETHER IN AFRICA, THE AMERICAS, EUROPE OR SE ASIA/ASIA MUST WORK TO UNITE. MANDELLA'S CALL FOR AN AFRICAN RENAISSANCE IS A GOOD STEP IN THAT DIRECTION (See www.raceandhistory.com also see http://community.webtv.net )
The potential of Blacks in Asia is very large. At the moment, the Blacks/Africoids of Melanesia, Papua-New Guinea, West Papua, India are all aware of their African connections. They have been aware of it for thousands of years, although the colonial period tried to devide them from the rest of the African Diaspora. This same trick is being used by the Arab occupiers of parts of Africa when they attempt to crush and destroy evidence of OUR ANCESTORS CONTRIBUTIONS TO CIVILIZATION AND REFUSE TO ACCEPT ANY CIVILIZATION AND CULTURE THAT EXISTED BEFORE THEM...WE AFRICANS SHOULD NOT ACCEPT THIS FORM OF SANCTIFIED RACISM AND ETHNIC CHAUVANISM AND SHOULD PAY RESPECTS TO OUR CULTURE, CIVILIZATIONS AND ANCESTORS.
Hence, African nations should establish Brotherly Unity with Blacks in Asia just as Europeans and Americans have "Brotherly Unity" with the whites in Australia and New Zealand or South Africa. We can do more than just acknowledging the existance of Africoid people in Asia and Melanesia, we should work to build cultural and economic, military and political ties as well. THE KENYAN GOVERNMENT IS ALREADY DOING THAT, WHEN MASAI PEOPLE AND AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES GET TOGETHER TO LEARN ABOUT EACH OTHERS CULTURE EVEN THOUGH THE RACIAL CONNECTIONS BETWEEN THE MASAI AND AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES IN AFRICA GO BACK THOUSANDS OF YEARS.
In retrospect, its time for us to unite as Blacks and Africans on a worldwide scale. It is time to build a powerful Black economy and improve African culture worldwide. (see the great book, "Susu and Susunomics: The Theory and Practice of Pan-African Economic, Cultural and Racial Self-Preservation," published by www.iuniverse.com (Iuniverse, Inc., 910 East Hamilton Avenue, Suite 100; Campbell, California, U.S.A. 95008 United States WE MUST UNITE, BUILD AND WORK TO PRESERVE OUR PEOPLE AND CULTURES, as the world takes a new turn. We are being ran over by other people who want to use Blacks as their allies, who want to push Blacks into their religions and culture, but who also want to eliminate Blacks from the face of the earth and take our MOTHERLANDS, WHILE WE WATCH, SIT AND SAY OR DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
Nubiyang
nubianem3@webtv.net
http://community.webtv.net/paulnubiaempire
http://WWW.RACEANDHISTORY.COM
http://www.cwo.com/~lucumi/runoko.html
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Jesus travel to Ethiopia according to Coptic
Posted: Monday, December 17, 2001
( Ras Mandingo )
There's a very good book called "Jesus lived in India" wich can illustrate this topic. Also "the murder of Christ" is wonderful.
So interesting to see Jesus as an articulated disciple, who chose himself, to show how much we could do ourselves!
it's really degenerative this idea of Jesus as someone who could do our work for ourselves!
As Cheik Anta Diop said in Civilization or Barbarism " Crist is a title for someone who watch over the misteries".
Thanks for the cultural and educational vibes!
RAs Mandingo, posting from Brasil.
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( Ingrid )
That is an interesting book, which I read a while back but it is important to remember that Christ or KRST is the title of a person at a particular stage of development and throughout African history there were many. That is the reason the descriptions vary from region to region. But at least from all evidence they were black.
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( RootsWomb(man) )
The title "Christ" (anointed one) has its ROOTS from the word KRST, also seen in the word "Krishna" in its masculine form, "Kali" in its feminine form, both meaning and being BLACK.
"The earliest gods and messiahs on all the continents were black. Research has yielded an impressive amount of material on the subject...The Messiahs, some of whom lived many centuries before Christ, had lives which so closely paralleled that of Christ that it seems most likely that the story of the latter was adapted from them. Moreover, the word Christ comes from the Indian, Krishna or Chrisna, which means "The Black One." J.A. Rogers
ROOTS
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( Akinkawon )
Generally most of J.A. Rogers work could be easily proven today and I maintain a healthy respect for his insights, however, I believe that the Greeks and Romans got their concept of a Christ from the Egyptians hence they got closer to the ancient meaning - the anointed one.
Given the fact that persons in training for higher enlightenment used to travel to distant lands to learn about our diversity, the Indians knew the concept of Christhood before the Greeks and Romans. They would have coined the meaning ‘the Black one’ from the appearance of the enlightened one. They may not have known what the Egyptians then later the Coptic meant by a KRST which is pronounced Christ before and after the use of vowels.
The Jews learned of this divine state from the Egyptians and they have been trying since then to make an anointed one for themselves. They do not know how that state is attained.
Egypt was the dominant power in the World at one time and people from all lands traveled to Egypt to get enlightened or at least sit at the feet of high priests.
A point of importance is that the enlightened ones of Egypt came from many different regions in Africa all the way to the Bantu people. The Egyptians were very fond of learning from the other African peoples with whom they traded and they held the elders in Nubia and Ethiopia in high regard.
I am drifting from the topic to make an important point often missed in the best of African history. All past and present enlightened Africans learned from all the peoples they encountered and they held the elders in the remotest parts of Africa in high regard.
Also there are many different African names for that same state of Christhood that is well depicted in the symbols of more indigenous Africans.
Even in the Christian concept of a Christ they show him traveling to many regions to learn. This was not only an Egyptian practice but was a practice developed in more Ancient African culture.
So as Ingrid alluded, a KRST is not one physical person for all eternity. Many different people have embodied the essence of life and have been able to assist in the evolution of humanity. KRST is the highest stage of human development. However what is depicted in the Christian concept of a Christ is not of the highest realization but more of a compilation of the characteristics of more indigenous anointed ones. There are many parts of their depiction that rings true but there are other parts that clearly show they did not grasp the essence of that stage of development. (QUITE UNDEDRSTANDABLE)
Looking for a Christ is a big deal today only because most people are lost but this was a natural developmental process for all people before people entered a new phase of corruption that started when Europeans migrated/invaded Africa, a land they had lost contact with and did not regard and remember was their former homeland.
I feel sorry for those who are in search of a White saviour because historically no one has stood out but the African saviours are many and legendary. That would make another interesting discussion. The idea that people could stay ignorant and simply claim to believe and that equals salvation or enlightenment is the most disrespectful thing they can do today. It means the very myths they hold they don’t understand. As even in the Christian book it shows how a saviour is a learned person who does not allow racial prejudice to block him from learning.
These are the good examples they could draw from their ‘bibles’ but no, today if you tell some Black Christians (that includes Rasta Christians) to examine the culture closest to them, they are more afraid than Whites. There can be no worst form of slavery than that.
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( RootsWomb(man) )
HOTEP!
YES! You are absolutely correct! The KRST pre-dates KRISHNA, as Kush/Khemet is India's MOTHER...but I LOOOOOVED when you said this:
"These are the good examples they could draw from their ‘bibles’ but no, today if you tell some Black Christians (that includes Rasta Christians) to examine the culture closest to them, they are more afraid than Whites. There can be no worst form of slavery than that."
TRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
AFRIKANS - ARIZE!
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( livelyup )
Greetings,
I give thanks for the powerful reasoning.
I&I believe that there is an important relationship that has been alluded to here but not spoken of explicitly, that is the the need for a context out of which an elightened one (KRST, christ, buddha, sadhu, sage...) may emerge. It is probably not enough for any individual to simply wish to become wise. For this wish to become reality requires that they are able to exist in a community that values wisdom, as opposed to the rote repition of 'truth', and that has developed a respect for the methods of attaining that wisdom. This, of necessity, is synonymous with a repect for the importance of the individual reaching understanding by their own power, rather than this understanding being handed down via an institutionalised source.
This may be the reason for the large number of african sages that have achieved historical prominance. In the african communities there seems to have existed communities that treasured wisdom, activley researched and applied the means to its attainment, and who celebrated and protected the wise.
In my own ancestral lands of Europe this was not the case since the coming of the romans. With them came institutionalised truth, which served their broader aims of a total dominance of all forms of defining what was legitimate. They activley sought to completely destroy all traces of the existing wisdom culture in its druidic form sending their death squads to explicitly exterminate these forms of social practices. Any subsequent efforts on the part of european people to re-connect with traditions of wisdom were met with persecution, torture, and death. This institutionalised legitimacy became part and parcel of european culture, and was a significant part of the genocide that we wrought on the indiginous inhabitants of the lands that we subsequently subjegated. We became the new romans. On an individual level for the average european this situation that has only very recently been, to some extent, reversed, with the renewed interest in wisdom traditions that has taken place since the 1930's and a corresponding lessening in the institutional capacity to suppress this trend. While the wait continues for a visible manifestation and personification of this new appreciation of wisdom amongst those of european cultural origins, ini would suggest that appropriate icons and exemplars may be found in the myths and belief systems that existed before the influence of the roman conquerers. Scratch an old celtic god/goddess, hero / heroine deep enough and you may just find the faintest traces of the 'white krst' that currently proves so ellusive.
Far more insidious has been the position of women with respect to participation in the search for enlightenment. Even within cultures that have been tolerant and supportive of those who seek wisdom, i&i believe that it is true to say that women have not been able to participate with equal freedom and power. Once again, perhaps it is in the more symbolic forms of myth and legend that we see personifications of the female krst principle.
Ini believe that the rasta collective need to be aware of this. Perhaps it is important for us to reason on how we may best create a community that best supports and transmits wisdom, and that activley pursues and develops the ways of wisdom, for all people who have the desire to travel this road.
Much respect and love,
Paul
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( Akinkawon )
Interesting point, but a wise one ‘a KRST’ does not have a fragile ego that needs massaging. A KRST comes with the wisdom for the times we live in and the time we live in is antagonistic to the truth and higher principles so a real enlightened one would know how to navigate these times. It is not as if an enlightened one could be ignorant of the present environment.
Those that are in search of higher heights would value the truth for what it is whether it comes through a Man or Woman. It is the arrogance of males that has opened the way for females to become Women. As most females had to rely on their wits and other senses to survive the arrogance of male superiority, many are more developed today to reason on higher levels. The principle of Christhood is gender neutral, therefore any one (male or female, Black or White can attain it) the key is in knowing the processes for developing that essence in your self. This can be discussed some time in the near future.
But for the purposes of this discussion, it does not matter if many or few people can detect the KRST as those that were/are on the path of resisting mental slavery would see the KRST first as a aid or teacher then in themselves.
The KRST has different levels of meaning.
First it relates to those who have attained that union with the universal essence therefore can reason from a Universal understanding, then as a principle.
Another point is the reason at a particular time different cultures see the KRST with different features is because it usually is more that one person.
One person attains this union, and then the lessons are passed to others who were seeking (disciples). This brings about many such enlightened persons who disperse to areas where enlightenment is needed. So in China they may depict an anointed one with different features around the same time others are being portrayed differently in other parts of the world.
It is about a body of ideas that are realized through a discipline.
To become the embodiment of higher divine essence those seeking must first develop their principle of Manhood and Womanhood (this is different from maleness and femaleness). These principles are what give birth to the neutral essence (kundalini), commonly called the Son of God.
There are female names for Women who have attained this balance of Christhood. We can always develop this further as I have seen RootsWomb(man) referred to a few.
The people who are aware of these forces always hold the principles in high regard and they hold their teachers in the highest esteem. This is present today. It is just that too few people are sufficiently aware of the rudiments of history to be mentally liberated.
That is what they mean by many are called but few a chosen. The words of truth go out to the multitude but few people are willing to overcome laziness to do their own investigation to realize the truths for themselves.
Today many are called but so few have done the preparatory work of informing themselves so they are unprepared to reason on any level above their emotions.
Many Whites are trying but they are yet to overcome their superiority complexes and to some extent arrogance when attempting to reason with the past and to a large extent Africans.
RA SPECT
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( livelyup )
Greetings,
Thank you for the clarifications and reasoning. Seen. The importance of community that I was reffering to was not for the benifit of those that have achieved mastery. As you have quite rightly pointed out, the sage has little need for the approval of others, being as they are aware of the futility of such distinctions as approval and disapproval. Rather i considered it to be of importance to those (such as myself) who are beginning on the way. The sort of disciple/master relationship that you referred to is an example of what I had in mind, though I also had in mind some of the more practical elements of life. This concern stems from a growing unease about the fundamental incompatibility of modern forms of life and the attainment of any form of wisdom. I&i am wishing to reason further on this, the relationship of wisdom to both the culture that surrounds (and hopefully supports) it, and the meditations, methods, tools, and techniques used for the perfection and development of understanding.
Respect and love
Paul
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( Akinkawon )
You have a good understanding as you interpreted the points quite well.
The point about finding a master is really something that you discover for yourself by you posing the questions and examining the responses you get. If you have the ability to grasp higher heights soon you would find yourself relating to several persons on a different level without any one telling you they are part of any particular group or school.
Discovering a Master is part of your own personal journey. I know my master and even if I introduce you to the individual, who has assisted many other individuals who in turn assist others, you still may not recognize them based on your needs.
Also, to ensure you do not waste your time in your search you should put on the table the deep questions you have and examine the different answers you get.
Finding masters is a major part of self-discovery as no one can do it on their own. But it is really up to you to recognize the master first through your own diligence and perseverance. Trust yourself!
RA SPECT
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( Ras Mandingo )
Greetings Brehtren!
Someone told me that: "when the disciple is ready, the master will appear". Good topic that you point. One has to be honest and listen to the own conscience , that is always judging, comforting or praising us. In the old times, God was the voice of one's conscience. It's funny because in portugues, conscience means "with science. when I can realize what is wrong, I'm closer to re-vealing what is right.
There's a youniversal/universal truth that can be feel and experinced directly. And so, one will start to meet people that are also looking for answers, and will be able to compare, to inpire, to get inspiration... It's getting self-conscious that you are on a way. But to where? heaven or hell? How we die is how we live.
THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS
Jesus said: "Whoever finds the interpretation of this sayings will not taste death. Let one who seeks not stop seeking until one finds. When one finds, one will be disturbed. When one is disturbed, one will be amazed, and will reign over all."
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( E.A.Sisi Tafari )
BLESSED BE THE HOLA ANNOINTED,HAILE SELLASSIE 1
Yes I;
Perfect trend;I give thanks.
To the brother from europe, pursue whatever is your righteous dream and help will come your way.
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( IanI )
Ah! Greetings, Greetings!
Paul and Akinkawon!
What a refreshment for me morning to see the two reasoning here this day. And reaching overstandings and seeing the points made, how I must admit that brings I a wonderful sense of joy and a warmth. Seen.
Years ago, when I did first climb the hills to reason with James, quite a few white ones came to meet him, but me notice them brought with them pre-concieved attitudes and ideas of "enlightenment" from other religions or books or churches or temples. And all they saw when they saw James was, because of all that mind-conditioning and in-doctrination, was a 'dirty, scraggly, little, black man' that them could not relate to. A very, very few stayed and realized His Wisdom and accepted Him as their teacher and guide. But to most, Africa, Rastafari, Blackness, Natural Livity... all held undertones of the 'un-civilized'... the 'savages'. I think that for them this was sub-conscious, but isn't that what 'self knowledge' and 'enlightenment' is all about? Getting to know ones own self...consciously as well as sub-consciously?
I never felt any kind of ill feelings towards these people, just that I felt that maybe them would be on a very long, long journey since them did not seem to have a very good grasp on what them was really lookin for.
Irie Ites.
ONE LOVE/HEART/MIND
IanI Rastafari
Guidance and Protection
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( Jenny )
That is quite true for even African people. A very intelligent friend introduced me to a man whom he said was a teacher of the way and I traveled all the way to another country to meet him. The man did not look like an intelligent person so I wrestled with the idea about what is the look of intelligence. I could remember struggling with the feeling of disappointment. It is funny, but I want to go back because I missed out on an opportunity. Ingrid supposed to know who I talking about.
Many people are unaware of how media and certain images in books have altered our perceptions. I had this image of how Sai Baba looks and moves so I expected someone like him. But this man was very ordinary looking and he didn’t do anything spectacular at first glance. When I got home I had these strong feelings and I still wish to go back. You are correct and it affects even African people who don’t know ordinariness. Simplicity, that’s it.
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( IanI )
irie Sistren
Oh so true. In Jamaica is where IanI Rastafari get so much condemnation and rejection and scorn! And yet a white preacher man will come talkin about a white savior god and the people literally fall at his feet!! Pre-con-cieved brainwashment of the masses that can be that obvious, or as sub-conscious as I did speak of earlier.
The Realization for IanI is that the Naturalness of Creation is the Beauty of the Manifestation and that is the Simplicity the I speaks of. As far as 'going back', sistren, well may I suggest that the I forward when the opportunity presents itself once again and then perhaps the I will be in the mental and spiritual place where all that is being offered will be available unto the I. Seen. Give thanks.
Ites to the Most High.
IanI Rastafari
Guidance and Protection
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( livelyup )
Greetings and thanks to all!
First may i&i thank Akinkawon and all of the others who have patiently taken the time to reason and respond to the questions that i&i asked. This board is a special place that produces a truly wonderous array of thought and vision. I&i am lucky indeed to have stumbled upon it, it is not at all what i expected.....
Which brings me to this. IanI, once again you have demonstrated your uncanny gift at seeing straight into my mind and past the pretense that it is so often guarded with. Indeed, i&i have struggled to accept this rasta way. I have compared it overmuch with that which i was familiar, the zen, the tao, and the other asian schools. I cannot count how many times i&i have said in my mind, "they are really just like......". But you aren't, are you? Rasta is itself, and while it may be true that this livity aims to the same place as others, that is not the same as it being an identical thing. And so i&i have struggled on, thinking, thinking, too much thinking, when it is surrender that i&i must be practising instead. I have been a poor student of history. The truth never comes in the form that you expect it to (is this the first trial on the quest?). All of the great teachers have come from unexpected places, which in itself is a teaching about the idiocy of expectation....
So, Akinkawon, i&i will practice accptance and surrender, and will meditate, and hopefully one day will have a question of some worth to ask of those that write on this board. I will attempt to reveal my deep questions. But there is work to be done first. Thank you, and all, again for your help along the way.
Respect and love
Paul
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African Artifacts Suggest an Earlier Modern Human
Posted: Sunday, December 2, 2001
By John Noble Wilford, New York Times
December 2, 2001
More than 70,000 years ago, people occupied a cave in a high cliff facing the Indian Ocean at the tip of South Africa. They hunted grysbok, springbok and other game. They ate fish from the waters below them. In body and brain size, these cave dwellers were definitely anatomically modern humans.
Archaeologists are now finding persuasive evidence that these people were taking another important step toward modernity. They were turning animal bones into tools and finely worked weapon points, a skill more advanced in concept and application than the making of the usual stone tools. They were also engraving some artifacts with symbolic marks — manifestations of abstract and creative thought and, presumably, communication through articulate speech.
The new discoveries at Blombos Cave, 200 miles east of Cape Town, are turning long-held beliefs upside down.
Until now, modern human behavior was widely assumed to have been a very late and abrupt development that seemed to have originated in a kind of "creative explosion" in Europe. The most spectacular evidence for it showed up after modern Homo sapiens arrived there from Africa about 40,000 years ago. Although there had been suggestions of an African genesis of modern behavior, no proof had turned up, certainly nothing comparable to the fine tools and cave art of Upper Paleolithic Europe.
"I used to accept the `creative explosion' concept for the origin of modern human behavior," said Dr. Rick Potts, director of the human origins program at the Smithsonian Institution. "Now I think the nails are going into the coffin of that hypothesis. We are seeing many elements of modernity that were developing much earlier, in Africa, and more gradually."
One reason Europe's prehistoric surge of creativity held the attention of scholars for so long was that it had virtually no serious competition. Archaeologists had spent little time digging African sites of that period, while every year in Europe they seemed to find more cavern walls adorned with painted deer, horses and wild bulls. Enthralled, scholars perhaps could not bring themselves to look for earlier and more distant origins of modern behavior.
But after more than a decade of controversy, the South African cave artifacts are now being generally accepted as the earliest evidence of such modern human behavior. If correct, these and other findings establish that Homo sapiens came out of Africa not only with fully modern anatomies, but also with at least 30,000 years of experience in modern behavior. Dr. Potts said the beginning of this gradual behavioral evolution might reach back more than 200,000 years.
Archaeologists have described the new research and their interpretations in recent seminars and journal articles. A group led by Dr. Christopher S. Henshilwood of South Africa is publishing a comprehensive report in this month's issue of The Journal of Human Evolution.
The report includes an analysis of 28 bone tools and other artifacts from Blombos Cave, as well as 8,000 pieces of the iron oxide mineral ocher that might have been used for body decorations.
Taken together with other recent finds in Africa, Dr. Henshilwood's team reported, the Blombos evidence "for formal bone working, deliberate engraving on ochre, production of finely made bifacial points and sophisticated subsistence strategies is turning the tide in favor of models positing behavioral modernity in Africa at a time far earlier than previously accepted."
Many other archaeologists specializing in human evolution said the new research seemed to dispel previous doubts about the antiquity of the artifacts, which have been excavated and argued about since some of the first pieces were collected in 1992. Skeptics had suspected that artifacts of more recent vintage had somehow intruded into the cave's lower and thus older sediments.
The oldest such tools reliably dated in Africa had been only 25,000 years old. The lineage of the first human ancestors is estimated to have diverged between five million and seven million years ago in Africa from the line leading to apes. Anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, evolved in Africa about 150,000 to 100,000 years ago.
In an interview by telephone from the cave site, Dr. Henshilwood said: "We're absolutely convinced of the dating of the tools. Analysis of them makes us confident that what we have is evidence of a bone-tool industry, not just occasional pieces."
Most of the bone tools are awls, probably for working leather. But the most impressive ones, archaeologists say, are three sharp instruments. The bone appears to have been first roughly shaped with a stone blade. Then it was finished into a symmetrical shape and polished for hours, most likely with a piece of leather and ocher powder. Some etched marks might have identified the owner of what were hunting spear points.
"Why so finely polished?" Dr. Henshilwood asked. "It's actually unnecessary for projectile points to be so carefully made. It suggests to us that this is an expression of symbolic thinking. The people said, `Let's make a really beautiful object.' "
Like many hunter-gatherer societies, archaeologists say, these cave dwellers might have made some of these tools for exchange in long-distance trading. Beauty added value to the object, perhaps a value with symbolic meaning.
As Dr. Henshilwood explained: "Symbolic thinking means that people are using something to mean something else. The tools do not have to have only a practical purpose. And the ocher might be used to decorate their equipment, perhaps themselves. That is a symbol of something else, which we don't understand. But it suggests that these people must have had articulate speech to conceive and communicate such symbolism."
Dr. Henshilwood is an archaeologist at the South African Museum in Cape Town and an adjunct associate professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His co- authors are Dr. Francesco d'Errico of the Institute of Prehistory in Talence, France; Dr. Curtis W. Marean of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University; Dr. Richard G. Milo of Chicago State University, and Dr. Royden Yates, also of the South African Museum.
Another archaeologist, Dr. Alison Brooks of George Washington University, who has reported finding other early examples of African toolmaking in Congo, called Blombos Cave "a tremendously exciting site."
Dr. Brooks said the new research had produced "unquestionable evidence" that the artifacts were found in the layer of sediment in which they originated; they had not migrated there, through erosion or the action of burrowing animals, from higher and more recent strata.
Bone tools were indicative of modern behavior, Dr. Brooks said, because their production required a "higher level of planning and conceptualization than just knocking off flakes of stone." The toolmaker, she explained, had to have "a vision of the object in mind and be able to plan the creation of something complicated to solve a particular problem."
Not everyone is convinced that the Blombos discovery undercuts previous theories about the rise of sophisticated human behavior in Europe. Dr. Richard G. Klein, an archaeologist at Stanford University who has argued that human language and modern behavior appeared suddenly 50,000 years ago as a result of a genetic mutation in the brain, said he remained cautiously skeptical.
Dr. Klein said that he was still unconvinced that the bone tools had not originated in younger sediments and then migrated to the layer where they were found. And though he was impressed by the report of two pieces of ocher engraved in a crosshatched pattern, he questioned why, if the dating was correct, similar projectile points were not being found more widely in African sites.
Dr. Henshilwood and colleagues said that a thick layer of yellow sand separated the sediment layer in which the bone tools were found from a higher layer with evidence of human occupation only 2,000 years ago. No disturbances of this distinct break in the sediments, which could have allowed a downward movement of younger artifacts, were found in a recent re-examination of the cave, the archaeologists said.
Recent tests, Dr. Henshilwood said, showed that the chemical content of the bones in the tools was different from that of bones in the 2,000-year-old layer.
Dr. Marean of Arizona State University said that in the bone tools archaeologists were seeing a new picture of modern human evolution. "This puts the behavioral evolution in step with the anatomical evolution," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/02/science/
02BONE.html?ex=1008348890&ei=1&en=6c18ac7539d50ca8
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The Truth about The First Thanksgiving
Posted: Saturday, November 24, 2001
by James W. Loewen
Over the last few years, I have asked hundreds of college students, "When was the country we now know as the United States first settled?"
That is a generous way of putting the question. Surely "we now know as" implies that the original settlement happened before the United States. I had hoped that students would suggest 30,000 BC, or some other pre-Columbian date. They did not. Their consensus answer was "1620."
Part of the the problem is the word "settle." "Settlers" were white. Indians did not settle. Nor are students the only people misled by "settle." One recent Thanksgiving weekend, I listened as a guide at the Statue of Liberty told about European immigrants "populating a wild East Coast." As we shall see, however, if Indians had not already settled New England, Europeans would have had a much tougher job of it.
Starting with the Pilgrims not only leaves out the Indians, but also the Spanish. In the summer of 1526 five hundred Spaniards and one hundred black slaves founded a town near the mouth of the Pedee River in what is now South Carolina. Disease and disputes with nearby Indians caused many deaths. Finally, in November the slaves rebelled, killed some of their masters, and escaped to the the Indians. By now only 150 Spaniards survived, and they evacuated back to Haiti. The ex-slaves remained behind. So the first non-Native settlers in "the country we now know as the United States" were Africans.
The Spanish continued their settling in 1565, when they massacred a settlement of French Protestants at St. Augustine, Florida, and replaced it with their own fort. Some Spanish were pilgrims, seeking regions new to them to secure religious liberty: these were Spanish Jews, who settled in New Mexico in the late 1500s. Few Americans know that one third of the United States, from San Francisco to Arkansas to Natchez to Floirda, has been Spanish longer than it has been "American." Moreover, Spanish culture left an indelible impact on the West. The Spanish introduced horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, and the basic elements of cowboy culture, including its vocabulary: mustang, bronco, rodeo, lariat, and so on.
Beginnning with 1620 also omits the Dutch, who were living in what is now Albany by 1614. Indeed, 1620 is not even the date of the first permanent British settlement, for in 1607, the London Company sent settlers to Jamestown, Virginia. No matter. The mythic origin of "the country we now know as the United States" is at Plymouth Rock, and the year is 1620. My students are not at fault. The myth is what their testbooks and their culture have offered them. I examined how twelve textbooks used in high school American history classes teach Thanksgiving. Here is the version in one high school history book, THE AMERICAN TRADITION:
After some exploring, the Pilgrims chose the land around Plymouth Harbor for their settlement. Unfortunately, they had arrived in December and were not prepared for the New England winter. However, they were aided by freindly Indians, who gave them food and showed them how to grow corn. When warm weather came, the colonists planted, fished, hunted, and prepared themselves for the next winter. After harvesting their first crop, they and their Indian friends celebrated the first Thanksgiving.
My students also learned that the Pilgrims were persecuted in England for their religion, so they moved to Holland. They sailed on the Mayflower to America and wrote the Mayflower Compact. Times were rough, until they met Squanto. He taught them how to put fish in each corn hill, so they had a bountiful harvest.
But when I ask them about the plague, they stare back at me. "What plague? The Black Plague?" No, that was three centuries earlier, I sigh.
"THE WONDERFUL PLAGUE AMONG THE SAVAGES"
The Black Plague does provide a useful introduction, however. Black (or bubonic) Plague "was undoubtedly the worst disaster that has ever befallen mankind." In three years it killed 30 percent of the population of Europe. Catastrophic as it was, the disease itself comprised only part of the horror. Thinking the day of judgment was imminent, farmers failed to plant crops. Many people gave themselves over to alcohol. Civil and economic disruption may have caused as much death as the disease itself.
For a variety of reasons --- their probable migration through cleansing Alaskan ice fields, better hygiene, no livestock or livestock-borne microbes --- Americans were in Howard Simpson's assessment "a remarkable healthy race" before Columbus. Ironically, their very health now proved their undoing, for they had built up no resistance, genetically or through childhood diseases, to the microbes Europeans and Africans now brought them. In 1617, just before the Pilgrims landed, the process started in southern New England. A plague struck that made the Black Death pale by comparison.
Today we think it was the bubonic plague, although pox and influencza are also candidates. British fishermen had been fishing off Massachusetts for decades before the Pilgrims landed. After filling their hulls with cod, they would set forth on land to get firewood and fresh water and perhaps capture a few Indians to sell into slavery in Europe. On one of these expeditions they probably transmitted the illness to the people they met. Whatever it was, within three years this plague wiped out between 90 percent and 96 percent of the inhabitants of southern New England. The Indian societies lay devastated. Only "the twentieth person is scare left alive," wrote British eyewitness Robert Cushman, describing a death rate unknown in all previous human experience. Unable to cope with so many corposes, survivors fled to the next tribe, carrying the infestation with them, so that Indians died who had never seen a white person. Simpson tells what the Pilgrims saw:
The summer after the Pilgrims landed, they sent two envoys on a diplomatic mission to treat with Massasoit, a famous chief encamped some 40 miles away at what is now Warren, Rhode Island. The envoys discovered and described a scene of absolutie havoc. Villages lay in ruins because there was no one to tend them. The ground was strewn with the skulls and the bones of thousands of Indians who had died and none was left to bury them.
During the next fifteen years, additional epidemics, most of which we know to have been smallpox, struck repeatedly. Europeans caught smallpox and the other maladies, to be sure, but most recovered, including, in a later century, the "heavily pockmarked George Washington." Indians usually died. Therefore, almost as profound as their effect on Indian demographics was the impact of the epidemics on the two cultures, European and Indian. The English Separatists, already seeing their lives as part of a divinely inspired morality play, inferred that they had God on their side. John Winthrop, Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, called the plague "miraculous." To a friend in England in 1634, he wrote:
But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by the small pox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not fifty, have put themselves under our protect....
Many Indians likewise inferred that their God had abandoned them. Cushman, our British eyewitness, reported that "those that are left, have their courage much abated, and their countenance is dejected, and they seem as a people affrighted." After all, neither they nor the Pilgrims had access to the germ theory of disease. Indian healers offered no cure, their religion no explanation. That of the whites did. Like the Europeans three centuries before them, many Indians surrendered to alcohol or bagan to listen to Christianity.
These epidemics constituted perhaps the most important single geopolitical event of the first third of the 1600s, anywhere on the planet. They meant that the British would face no real Indian challenge for their first fifty years in America. Indeed, the plague helped cause the legendary warm reception Plymouth enjoyed in its first formative years from the Wampanoags. Massasoit needed to ally with the Pilgrims because the plague had so weakened his villages that he feared the Narragansetts to the west.
Moreover, the New England plagues exemplify a process which antedated the Pilgrims and endures to this day. In 1942, more than 3,000,000 Indians lived on the island of Haiti. Forty years later, fewer than 300 remained. The earliest Portuguese found that Labrador teemed with hospitable Indians who could easily be enslaved. It teems no more. In about 1780, smallpox reduced the Mandans of North Dakota from nine villages to two; then in 1837, a second smallpox epidemic reduced them from 1600 persons to just 31. The pestilence continues; a fourth of the Yanomamos of northern Brazil and souther Venezuela died in the year prior to my writing this sentence.
Europeans were never able to "settle" China, India, Indonesia, Japan, or most of Africa because too many people already lived there. Advantages in military and social technology would have enabled Europeans to dominate the Americas, as they eventually dominated China and Africa, but not to "settle" the New World. For that, the plague was required. Thus, except for the European (and African) invasion itself, the pestilence was surely the most important event in the history of America.
What do we learn of all this in the twelve histories I studied? Three offer some treatment of Indian disease as a factor in European colonization. LIFE AND LIBERTY does quite a good job. AMERICA PAST AND PRESENT supplies a fine analysis of the general impact of Indian disease in American history, though it leaves out the plague at Plymouth. THE AMERICAN WAY is the only text to draw the appropriate geopolitical inference about the importance of the Plymouth outbreak, but it never discuses Indian plagues anywhere else. Unfortunately, the remaining nine books offer almost nothing. Two totally omit the subject. Each of the other seven furnishes only a fragment of a paragraph that does not even make it into the index, let alone into students' minds.
Everyone knew all about the plague in colonial America. Even before the Mayflower sailed, King James of England gave thanks to "Almighty God in his great goodness and bounty towards us," for sending "this wonderful plague among the savages." Today it is no surprise that not one in a hundred of my college students has ever heard of the plague. Unless they read LIFE AND LIBERTY or PAST AND PRESENT, no student can come away from these books thinking of Indians as people who made an impact on North America, who lived here in considerable numbers, who settled, in short, and were then killed by disease or arms.
ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS
Instead of the plague, our schoolbooks present the story of the Pilgrims as a heroic myth. Referring to "the little party" in their "small, storm-battered English vessel," their story line follows Perry Miller's use of a Puritan sermon title, ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS. AMERICAN ADVENTURES even titles its chapter about British settlement in North America "Opening the Wilderness." The imagery is right out of Star Trek: "to go boldly where none dared go before."
The Pilgrims had intended to go to Virginia, where there already was a British settlement, according to the texts, but "violent storms blew their ship off course," according to some texts, or else an "error in navigation" caused them to end up hundreds of miles to the north. In fact, we are not sure where the Pilgrims planned to go. According to George Willison, Pilgrim leaders never intended to settle in Virginia. They had debated the relative merits of Guiana versus Massachusetts precisely because they wanted to be far from Anglican control in Virginia. They knew quite a bit about Massachusetts, from Cape Cod's fine fishing to that "wonderful plague." They brought with them maps drawn by Samuel Champlain when he toured the area in 1605 and a guidebook by John Smith, who had named it "New England" when he visited in 1614. One text, LAND OF PROMISE, follows Willison, pointing out that Pilgrims numbered only about thirty-five of the 102 settlers aboard the Mayflower. The rest were ordinary folk seeking their fortunes in the new Virginia colony. "The New England landing came as a rude surpise for the bedraggled and tired [non-Pilgrim] majority on board the Mayflower," says Promise. "Rumors of mutiny spread quickly." Promise then ties this unrest to the Mayflower Compact, giving its readers a uniquely fresh interpretation as to why the colonists adopted it.
Each text offers just one of three reasons---storm, pilot error, or managerial hijacking--to explain how the Pilgrims ended up in Massachusetts. Neither here nor in any other historical controversy after 1620 can any of the twelve bear to admit that it does not know the answer---that studying history is not just learning answers--that history contains debates. Thus each book shuts student sout from the intellectual excitement of the discipline.
Instead, textbooks parade ethnocentric assertions about the Pilgrims as a flawless unprecedented band laying the foundations of our democracy. John Garraty presents the Compact this way in AMERICAN HISTORY: "So far as any record shows, this was the first time in human history that a group of people consiously created a government where none had existed before." Such accounts deny students the opportunity to see the Pilgrims as anything other than pious stereotypes.
"IT WAS WITH GOD'S HELP...FOR HOW ELSE COULD WE HAVE DONE IT?"
Settlement proceeded, not with God's help but with the Indians'. The Pilgrims chose Plymouth because of its cleared fields, recently planted in corn, "and a brook of fresh water [that] flowed into the harbor," in the words of TRIUMPH OF THE AMERICAN NATION. It was a lovely site for a town. Indeed, until the plague, it had been a town. Everywhere in the hemisphere, Europeans pitched camp right in the middle of native populations---Cuzco, Mexico City, Natchez, Chicago. Throughout New England, colonists appropriated Indian cornfields, which explains why so many town names---Marshfield, Springfield, Deerfield--end in "field".
Inadvertent Indian assistance started on the Pilgrims' second full day in Massachusetts. A colonist's journal tells us:
We marched to the place we called Cornhill, where we had found the corn before. At another place we had seen before, we dug and found some more corn, two or three baskets full, and a bag of beans. ..In all we had about ten bushels, which will be enough for seed. It was with God's help that we found this corn, for how else could we have done it, without meeting some Indians who might trouble us. ...The next morning, we found a place like a grave. We decided to dig it up. We found first a mat, and under that a fine bow...We also found bowls , trays, dishes, and things like that. We took several of the prettiest things to carry away with us, and covered the body up again.
A place "like a grave!"
More help came from a alive Indian, Squanto. Here my students are on familiar turf, for they have all leanred the Squanto legend. LAND OF PROMISE provides an archetypal account"
Squanto had learned their language, he explained, from English fishermen who ventured into the New England waters each summer. Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to plant corn, squash, and pumpkins. Would the small band of settlers have survived without Squanto's help? We cannot say. But by the fall of 1621, colonists and Indians could sit down to several days of feast and thanksgiving to God (later celebrated as the first Thanksgiving).
What do the books leave out about Squanto? First, how he learned English. As a boy, along with four Penobscots, he was probably stolen by a British captain in about 1605 and taken to England. There he probably spent nine years, two in the employ of a Plymouth merchant who later helped finance the Mayflower. At length, the merchant helped him arrange passage back to Massachusetts. He was to enjoy home life for less than a year, however. In 1614, a British slave raider seized him and two dozen fellow Indians and sold them into slavery in Malaga, Spain. Squanto escaped from slavery, escaped from Spain, made his way back to England, and in 1619 talked a ship captain into taking him along on his next trip to Cape Cod.
It happens that Squanto's fabulous odyssey provides a "hook" into the plague story, a hook that our texts choose to ignore. For now Squanto walked to his home village, only to make the horrifying discovery that, in Simpson's words, "he was the sole member of his village still alive. All the others had perished in the epidemic two years before." No wonder he throws in his lot with the Pilgrims, who rename his village "Plymouth!" Now that is a story worth telling! Compare the pallid account in LAND OF PROMISE. "He had learned their language from English fishermen." What do we make of books that give us the unimportant details--Squanto's name, the occupation of his enslavers--while omitting not only his enslavement, but also the crucial fact of the plague? This is distortion on a grand scale.
William Bradford praised Squanto for many services, including his "bring[ing] them to unknow places for their profit." "Their profit" was the primary reason most Mayflower colonists made the trip. It too came from the Indians, from the fur trade; Plymouth would never have paid for itself without it. Europeans had neither the skill nor the desire to "go boldly where none dared go before.|" They went to the Indians.
"TRUTH SHOULD BE HELD SACRED, AT WHATEVER COST"
Should we teach these truths about Thanksgiving? Or, like our textbooks, should we look the other way? Again quoting LAND OF PROMISE. "By the fall of 1621, colonists and Indians could sit down to several days of feast and thanksgiving to God (later celebrated as the first Thanksgiving)." Throughout the nation, elementary school children still enact Thanksgiving every fall as our national origin myth, complete with Pilgrim hats made of construction paper and Indian braves with feathers in their hair. An early Massachusetts colonist, Colonel Thomas Aspinwall, advises us not to settle for this whitwash of feel - good - history.
"It is painful to advert to these things. But our forefathers, though wise, pious, and sincere, were nevertheless, in respect to Christian charity, under a cloud; and, in history, truth should be held sacred, at whatever cost."
Thanksgiving is full of embarrassing facts. The Pilgrims did not introduce the Native Americans to the tradition; Eastern Indians had observed autumnal harvest celebrations for centuries. Our modern celebrations date back only to 1863; not until the 1890s did the Pilgrims get included in the tradition; no one even called them "Pilgrims" until the 1870s. Plymouth Rock achieved ichnographic status only in the nineteenth century, when some enterprising residents of the town moved it down to the water so its significance as the "holy soil" the Pilgrims first touched might seem more plausible. The Rock has become a shrine, the Mayflower Compact a sacred text, and our textbooks play the same function as the Anglican BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, teaching us the rudiments of the civil religion of Thanksgiving.
Indians are marginalized in this civic ritual. Our archetypal image of the first Thanksgiving portrays the groaning boards in the woods, with the Pilgrims in their starched Sunday best and the almost naked Indian guests. Thanksgiving silliness reaches some sort of zenith in the handouts that school children have carried home for decades, with captions like, "They served pumpkins and turkeys and corn and squash. The Indians had never seen such a feast!" When his son brought home this "information" from his New Hampshire elementary school, Native American novelist Michael Dorris pointed out "the Pilgrims had literally never seen `such a feast,' since all foods mentioned are exclusively indigenous to the Americas and had been provided by [or with the aid of] the local tribe."
I do not read Aspinwall as suggesting a "bash the Pilgrims" interpretation, emphasizing only the bad parts. I have emphasized untoward details only because our histories have suppressed everything awkward for so long. The Pilgrims' courage in setting forth in the late fall to make their way on a continent new to them remains unsurpassed. In their first year, like the Indians, they suffered from diseases. Half of them died. The Pilgrims did not cause the plague and were as baffled as to its true origin as the stricken Indian villagers. Pilgrim-Indian relations began reasonably postitively. Thus the antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history, but honest and inclusive history. "Knowing the truth about Thanksgiving, both its proud and its shameful motivations and history, might well benefit contemporary children," suggests Dorris. "But the glib retelling of an ethnocentric and self-serving falsehood does no one any good." Because Thanksgiving has roots in both Anglo and Native cultures, and because of the interracial cooperation the first celebration enshrines, Thanksgiving might yet develop into a holiday that promotes tolerance and understanding. Its emphasis on Native foods provides a teachable moment, for natives of the Americas first developed half of the world's food crops. Texts could tell this--only three even mention Indian foods---and could also relate other contributions form Indian societies, from sports to political ideas. The original Thanksgiving itself provides an interesting example: the Natives and newcomers spent the better part of three days showing each other their various recreations.
Origin myths do not come cheaply. To glorify the Pilgrims is dangerous. The genial ommissions and false details our texts use to retail the Pilgrim legend promote Anglocentrism, which only handicaps us when dealing with all those whose culture is no Anglo. Surely, in histor, "truth should be held sacred, at whatever cost."
Lies My Teacher Told Me
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
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Concentration camps were used by the Germans in South West Africa
Posted: Friday, November 16, 2001
By Casper W Erichsen
In a recent M-Net documentary, Scorched Earth, an array of historians described how the deplorable and inhumane conditions in concentration camps accounted for the deaths of 27 297 Boers, as well as an estimated 20 000 black casualties.
The programme marked the centenary of the use of concentration camps in South Africa.
The ripples of the outcry that followed Emily Hobhouse's exposure of these British war atrocities are still felt today, as illustrated by the very emotional tone of the M-Net programme.
These emotions stand in stark contrast to the largely forgotten history of Namibia's equally sinister history of concentration camps.
There were five concentration camps in all in Namibia, then German South West Africa, between 1904 and 1908. They were called Konzentrationslagern in reports and succeeded South African camps by two years.
The anti-colonial struggles of 1904 to 1908 were characterised by two major uprisings: the Herero uprising in northern and central Namibia and the Nama uprising in the south.
In January 1904 war broke out between the Herero nation and the German colonial administration in Namibia. The colonists were caught by surprise and suffered many defeats in the early stages of the sporadic and uncoordinated war.
After about six months the picture changed. The battle at the Waterberg, in the north-east, on August 11 1904, marked the beginning of the end for the Herero, who fled in their thousands into the Omaheke sandveld, perishing in high numbers.
The Herero nation was literally uprooted as an entire people spread across the Kalahari, trying to flee German punitive patrols. Those who did not reach Bechuanaland, now Botswana, either succumbed to the desert or were picked up by German patrols and put in concentration camps.
In 1904 camps had been set up in Windhoek, Okahandja and at the coastal town of Swakopmund. In 1905 two new camps were opened in Karibib and Lüderitz.
In terms of mortality statistics, the Namibian camps were horrific. An official report on the camps in 1908 described the mortality rate as 45,2% of all prisoners held in the five camps.
The prisoners were typically fenced in, either by thorn-bush fences or by barbed wire. As the word concentration implies, thousands of people were crammed into small areas. The Windhoek camp held about 5 000 prisoners of war in 1906.
Rations were minimal, consisting of a daily allowance of a handful of uncooked rice, some salt and water. Rice was an unfamiliar foodstuff to most, and the uncommon diet was the cause of many deaths.
Disease was uncontrolled. An almost total lack of medical attention, unhygienic living quarters, insufficient clothing and a high concentration of people meant that diseases such as typhoid spread rapidly.
Beatings and maltreatment were also part of life in the camps - the sjambok was often swung over the backs of prisoners who were forced to work.
The concentration camp on Shark Island, in the coastal town of Lüderitz, was the worst of the five Namibian camps. Lüderitz lies in southern Namibia, flanked by desert and ocean. In the harbour lies Shark Island, which then was connected to the mainland only by a small causeway.
The island is now, as it was then, barren and characterised by solid rock carved into surreal formations by the hard ocean winds. The camp was placed on the far tip of the relatively small island, where the prisoners would have suffered complete exposure to the gale-force winds that sweep Lüderitz for most of the year.
The first prisoners to arrive were, according to a missionary called Kuhlman, 487 Herero ordered to work on the railway between Lüderitz and Kubub.
The island soon took its toll: in October 1905 Kuhlman reported the appalling conditions and high death rate among the Herero on the island.
Throughout 1906 the island had a steady inflow of prisoners, with 1 790 Nama prisoners arriving on September 9 alone.
In the annual report for Lüderitz in 1906, an unknown clerk remarked that "the Angel of Death" had come to Shark Island. German Commander Von Estorff wrote in a report that approximately 1 700 prisoners had died by April 1907, 1 203 of them Nama. In December 1906, four months after their arrival, 291 Nama died (a rate of more than nine people a day). Missionary reports put the death rate at between 12 and 18 a day.
As much as 80% of the prisoners sent to the Shark Island concentration camp never left the island.
Fred Cornell, a British aspirant diamond prospector, was in Lüderitz when the Shark Island camp was being used. Cornell wrote of the camp: "Cold - for the nights are often bitterly cold there - hunger, thirst, exposure, disease and madness claimed scores of victims every day, and cartloads of their bodies were every day carted over to the back beach, buried in a few inches of sand at low tide, and as the tide came in the bodies went out, food for the sharks."
During the war a number of people from the Cape, strapped for money, sought employment as transport riders for German troops in Namibia.
Upon their return to the Cape some of these people recounted their stories, causing debate in the local media. On September 28 1905 an article appeared in the Cape Argus, with the heading: "In German S. W. Africa: Further Startling Allegations: Horrible Cruelty".
In the article, Percival Griffith, "an accountant of profession, who owing to hard times, took up on transport work at Angra Pequena [Lüderitz]", related his experiences.
"There are hundreds of them, mostly women and children and a few old men ... when they fall they are sjamboked by the soldiers in charge of the gang, with full force, until they get up ... On one occasion I saw a woman carrying a child of under a year old slung at her back, and with a heavy sack of grain on her head ... she fell.
"The corporal sjamboked her for certainly more than four minutes and sjamboked the baby as well ... the woman struggled slowly to her feet, and went on with her load. She did not utter a sound the whole time, but the baby cried very hard."
These atrocities did not go unnoticed by the Germans, who wrote reports, articles and letters about the camps. Shark Island came up in a German Parliament debate in 1906, when the Social Democrats demanded to know what was going on there.
It seems, however, that generations since then have tried hard to forget this history.
The South African camps have memorials and written histories, the Namibian camps do not. On the site where Shark Island once lay now lies a caravan park. Even worse, at the entrance of the park is a monument to the German soldiers who died between 1905 and 1908 - a monument to the victor and not the victim.
The centenary of the 1904 war is just around the corner; perhaps Namibians will take the opportunity to reflect, not so much on what is remembered but rather on what is not.
-- The Mail&Guardian, August 23, 2001.
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AFRICAN RENAISSANCE
Posted: Thursday, November 15, 2001
By THABO MBEKI
The President of South Africa
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A struggle for political power is dragging the kingdom of Lesotho towards the abyss of a violent conflict. The Democratic Republic of Congo is sliding back into a conflict of arms, which its people had hoped they had escaped forever.
The silence of peace has died on the borders of Eritrea and Ethiopia because, in a debate about an acre or two of land, guns have usurped the place of reason. Those who had risked death in Guinea-Bissau, as they fought as comrades to evict the Portuguese colonialists, today stand behind opposing ramparts speaking to one fearsome rhythm of the beat of machine-gun fire.
A war seemingly without mercy rages in Algeria made more horrifying by a savagery which seeks to anoint itself with the sanctity of a religious faith.
Thus can we say that the children of Africa, from north to south, from the east to the west and at the very centre of our continent, continue to be consumed by death dealt out by those who have proclaimed a sentence of death on dialogue and reason and on the children of Africa, whose limbs are too weak to run away from the rage of the adults.
Both of these, the harbingers of death and the victims of their wrath, are as African as you and I. For that reason, for the reason that we are the disemboweled African mothers and the decapitated African children of Rwanda, we have to say: Enough and no more.
It is because of these pitiful souls, who are the casualties of a destructive force for whose birth they are not to blame, that Africa needs her renaissance. Were they alive and assured that the blight of human-made death had passed for ever, we would have less need to call for renaissance. In the summer of light and warmth and life-giving rain, it is to mock the gods to ask them for light and warmth and life-giving rain. The passionate hope for the warming rays of the sun is the offspring of the shill and dark nights of the winters of our lives.
Africa has no need for the criminals, who would acquire political power by slaughtering the innocents, as do the butchers of the people of Richmond in KwaZulu Natal. Nor has she need for such as those who, because they did not accept that power is legitimate only because it serves the interests of the people, laid Somalia to waste and deprived its people of a country which gave its citizens a sense of being, as well as the being to build themselves into a people.
Neither has Africa need for the petty gangsters who would be our governors by theft of elective positions, as a result of holding fraudulent elections, or by purchasing positions of authority through bribery and corruption. The thieves and their accomplices, the givers of the bribes and the recipients are as African as you and I. We are the corrupter and the harlot who act together to demean our continent and ourselves.
The time has come that we say enough and no more, and by acting to banish the shame remake ourselves as the midwives of the African renaissance.
An ill wind has blown me across the face of Africa. I have seen the poverty of Orlando East and the wealth of Morningside in Johannesburg. In Lusaka, I have seen the poor of Kanyama township and the prosperous risidents of Kubulonga. I have seen the African slums of Surulere in Lagos and the African opulence of Victoria Island. I have seen the faces of the poor in Mbari in Harare and the quiet wealth of Borrowdale.
And I have heard the stories of how those who had access to power, or access to those who had access to power, of how they have robbed and pillaged and broken all laws and all ethical norms with great abandon to acquire wealth, all of them tied by an invisible thread which they hope will connect them to Morningside and Borrowdale and Victoria Island and Kabulonga.
Every day, you and I see those who would be citizens of Kabulonga and Borowdale and Victoria Island and Morningside being born everywhere in our country. Their object in life is to acquire personal wealth by means both foul and fair. Their measure of success is the amount of wealth they can accumulate and the ostentation they can achieve which will convince all that they are a success because, in a visible way, they are people of means.
Thus they seek access to power or access to those who have access to power so that they can corrupt the political order for personal gain at all costs. In this equation, the poverty of the masses of the people becomes a necessary condition for the enrichment of the few and the corruption of political power the only possible condition for its exercise.
It is out of this pungent mixture of greed, dehumanizing poverty, obscene wealth and endemic public and private corrupt practice that many of Africa's coups d'etat, civil wars and situations of instability are born and entrenched.
The time has come that we call a halt to the seemingly socially approved deification of the acquisition of material wealth and the abuse of state power to impoverish the people and deny our continent the possibility to achieve sustainable economic development.
Africa cannot renew herself where its upper achelons are a mere parasite on the rest of society, enjoying a self-endowed mandate to use their political power and define the uses of such power such that its exercise ensures that our continent reproduces itself as the periphery of the world economic - poor, underdeveloped and incapable of development.
The African renaissance demands that we purge ourselves of the parasites and maintain a permanent vigilance against the danger of the entrenchment in African society of this rapacious stratum with its social morality according to which everything in society must be organized materially to benefit the few.
As we recall with pride the African scholar and author of the Middle Ages, Sadi of Timbuktu, who had mastered such subjects as law, logic, dialectics, grammar and rhetoric, and other African intellectuals who taught at the University of Timbuktu, we must ask the question: Where are Africa's intellectuals today?
In our world in which the generation of new knowledge and its application to change the human condition is the engine which moves human society further and further away from barbarism, do we have need to recall Africa's hundreds of thousands of intellectuals back from their places of emigration in Western Europe and North America to rejoin those who remain still within our shores?
I dream of the day when these, the African mathematicians and computer specialists in Washington and New York, the African physicists, engineers, doctors, business managers and economists, will return from London and Manchester and Paris and Brussels to add to the African pool of brain power to inquire into and find solutions to Africa's problems and challenges; to open the African door to the world of knowledge; to elevate Africa's place within the universe of research, the formation of new knowledge, education and information.
Africa's renewal demands that her intelligentia must immerse itself in the titanic and all-round struggle to end poverty, ignorance, disease and backwardness, inspired by the fact that the Africans of Egypt were, in some instances, two thousand years ahead of the Europeans of Greece in the mastery of such subjects as geometry, trigonometry, algebra and chemistry.
In the end, they wanted us to despise ourselves, convinced that if we were not subhuman we were, at least, not equal to the colonial master and mistress and were incapable of original thought and the African creativity which has endowed the world with an extraordinary treasure of masterpieces in architecture and the fine arts.
The beginning of our rebirth as a continent must be our own discovery of our soul, captured and made permanently available in the great works of creativity represented by the pyramids and sphinxes of Egypt, the stone buildings of Axum and the ruins of Carthage and Zimbabwe, the rock paintings of the San, the Benin bronzes and the African masks, the carvings of the Makonde and the stone sculptures of the Shona.
A people capable of such creativity could never have been less human than other human beings, and being as human as any other, such people can and must be its own liberator from the condition which seeks to describe our continent and its people as the poverty-stricken and disease-ridden primitives in a world riding the crest of a wave of progress and human upliftment.
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Could Oil be the reason Britian and America rushed into this conflict?
Posted: Sunday, October 28, 2001
East and west are jockeying for influence in the Caucasus.
The prize is oil and gas
By Richard Norton-Taylor
GUARDIAN UK - A new and potentially explosive Great Game is being set up and few in Britain are aware of it. There are many players: far more than the two - Russia and Britain - who were engaged a century ago in imperial rivalry in central Asia and the north-west frontier. more
The oil behind Bush and Son's campaigns
By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI - Just as the Gulf War in 1991 was all about oil, the new conflict in South and Central Asia is no less about access to the region's abundant petroleum resources, according to Indian analysts. more
The New Gold Mines of Central Asia
Dr. Walid Majid, Institue for Afghan Studies
It turns out that the Central Asian republics of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan are sitting on what is thought to be one of the world's largest reserves of oil and gas. The total worth of the reserves is estimated to be somewhere between $2.5-$3.5 trillion at today's market prices.
Despite the vast resources, their current energy production is dwarfed by what could be in store in the coming decades. With their current low level of production and poor infra-structure everyone of these republics is in dire need of foreign capital as well as modern technology to exploit their buried natural reserves. Further complicating their plans, everyone of these new republics is landlocked, forcing them to find ways and means to reach consumer markets. By some accounts they need something like $50-$70 billion of foreign investment in the coming decades to enable them to extract and transport to energy hungry markets in Europe and Asia. (1) more
Lebanese-American businessman testified before the Senate
PBS - Richard Tamraz, a Lebanese-American businessman, testified before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee that he donated $300,000 dollars to the Democratic National Committee to change U.S. policy towards plans to build a pipeline in Central Asia, but he is not the only one interested in bringing the oil out of the Caspian Sea region. Margaret Warner discusses the how geopolitics and oil money intersect with two experts. more
Afghan Pipeline: A New Great Game
BBC - Great-power interest in Afghanistan is once again rising, thanks to plans to build a new pipeline across the country, taking gas from landlocked Central Asia to Pakistan and world markets. In October the project took a step closer to reality with the signing of a deal between Turkmenistan, the primary source of the gas, and an international consortium led by the American UNOCAL company. But the problem, of course, is the continuing civil war in Afghanistan - and who, if anyone, in Afghanistan can guarantee security for the pipeline. Here's our regional analyst Malcolm Haslett: more
Unocal 'Smoking Gun' Alleged
By William Branigin Washington Post Staff Writer
Attorneys for a group of Burmese refugees say they have discovered a "smoking gun" document supporting their claims that a major U.S. oil company should be held accountable for human rights violations related to construction of a natural gas pipeline in Burma.
The 15 plaintiffs, representing thousands who fled to the Burma-Thailand border in the early 1990s, charge that Unocal Corp. and the French oil firm Total SA, partners in the project with the Burmese government, were complicit in human rights abuses by Burmese forces. The abuses allegedly included the forced relocation of entire villages, the use of slave labor, and numerous deaths, beatings, rapes and property seizures. Unocal denies the charges. more
A Taliban delegation visited Unocal's offices in Sugarland
When Kabul fell to Taliban forces, the US Oil company UNOCAL shocked world public opinion by announcing its optimism about developments in Afghanistan. The Taliban victory was perceived as a positive sign. It was revealed that UNOCAL had been involved in negotiations with Taliban over a gas pipeline construction project that is designed to pass through western Afghanistan, delivering Turkmen gas to Pakistan. Before the escalation of fighting in Afghanistan, Chris Taggart, UNOCAL's executive vice-president in charge of the gas pipeline project, told Reuters his company was providing "non-cash bonus payments" to Taliban in return for their cooperation with this US$2 billion project. The Saudi Arabian Delta Oil Company is also a project partner and is believed to have had contacts with Taliban. more
Taleban in Texas for talks on gas pipeline
BBC - A senior delegation from the Taleban movement in Afghanistan is in the United States for talks with an international energy company that wants to construct a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to Pakistan. A spokesman for the company, Unocal, said the Taleban were expected to spend several days at the company's headquarters in Sugarland, Texas. Unocal says it has agreements both with Turkmenistan to sell its gas and with Pakistan to buy it. more
Ironies of the current crisis
CURWOOD: One of the ironies of the current crisis of terrorism is that Osama bin Laden and the Taliban both enjoyed American support not so very long ago. In the '80s, the U.S. encouraged fighters from across the Arab world to go to Afghanistan and repel the Soviet invasion. Once the Soviets were defeated, this force stayed in Afghanistan and from there began exporting their violent politics. more
US Department of Energy
Afghanistan's significance from an energy standpoint stems from its geographical position as a potential transit route for oil and natural gas exports from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea. This potential includes the possible construction of oil and natural gas export pipelines through Afghanistan, which was under serious consideration in the mid-1990s. The idea has since been undermined by Afghanistan's instability. Since 1996, most of Afghanistan has been controlled by the Taliban movement, which the United States does not recognize as the government of Afghanistan. more
Unocal Looks To Afghanistan's Taliban For New Profits
The Central Asian republic of Turkmenistan will begin pumping gas to Pakistan through Afghanistan by the year 2001 under an agreement signed on July 23rd by the two countries with proposed pipeline builders. A senior Unocal official said that all major factions in Afghanistan, including the dominant Taliban Islamic movement, had also signed project support agreements or letters. more
But Unocal now denies that a firm agreement was ever reached
The company is not supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan in any way whatsoever. Nor do we have any project or involvement in Afghanistan. more
Gas pipeline could be a pipe dream
BBC - Two years ago, Unocal thought it had found the perfect route via Afghanistan to tap Turkmenistan's abundant natural gas and sell it to the energy-hungry markets of Pakistan and India. It then quickly found eager partners to share in the risks and began the quest for financing the $2bn project. more
Still, in 1999 reports from Pakistan suggested that Unocal was considering rejoining Centgas. Unocal vehemently denied the reports.
DRAW YOUR OWN CONCLUSIONS
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Gabon and modern Slavery in Africa
Posted: Sunday, October 21, 2001
1470 - Portuguese arrive in what is now Gabon.
1839 - Local Mpongwe ruler signs away sovereignty to the French.
1910 - Gabon becomes part of French Equatorial Africa.
1958 - Gabon votes to become autonomous republic in the French Community.
1960 - Gabon becomes independent.
1961 - Leon Mba elected president.
1964 - French forces restore Mba's presidency after crushing military coup.
1967 - Bongo becomes president after Mba dies.
1973 - Bongo converts to Islam and assumes the first name of Omar.
1990 - Opposition parties legalized, accuse the government of fraud in parliamentary elections held in September and October.
1991 - Parliament adopts a new constitution which formalises the multiparty system.
1993 - Bongo narrowly wins presidential election, the first held under the new multiparty constitution; opposition accuses government of electoral fraud.
1996 - Governing Gabonese Democratic Party wins significant majority in parliamentary elections.
1998 - Bongo re-elected to a seven-year term.
BBC - The slave children
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Bombing a Myth
Posted: Monday, October 15, 2001
By John Maxwell
IT'S been more or less official -- as official as science ever gets: the family of man is African. Even the most die-hard supporters of the theory that modern human populations arose spontaneously in several different regions of the world have abandoned that theology. The so-called "Multi-regional" theory was used to justify theories of "racial" differences and racial superiority.
The Multi-regionalists were dealt a fatal blow by a study, the results of which were published earlier this year in the magazine Science. A team of geneticists took gene samples from 12,127 men in Asia and Oceania. They examined characteristic DNA "markers" sequences of genetic code, from the Y (male chromosomes) of these modern men, Australians, Chinese, Polynesians, Japanese et al, and discovered that every one of them had a characteristic sequence which could be traced back to African ancestors who lived between 35,000 and 89,000 years ago. The latest research complemented and bolstered an earlier, smaller study, published in the January issue of the Annals of Human Genetics which also pointed to a recent African origin for the Y chromosome in men from Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Americas.
Stanford University molecular biologist Peter Underhill and colleagues analysed 218 markers in 1,062 men from 21 populations in those regions. "They saw the greatest diversity in two distinct and long-separated clusters of Y chromosomes in African men. In contrast, they found that all men outside Africa share the same mutation, called M168, which arose in an African ancestor between 35,000 and 89,000 years ago."
This means that African populations are more genetically diverse than people outside of Africa, suggesting, subversively, that some Africans may be more genetically advanced than everybody else.
The latest studies should put an end to the pseudo-scientific energies which have been expended over five hundred years to prove the superiority of one set of people to another. There is, as far as anyone knows, just one human race.
Racial profiling
In the wake of the WTC/Pentagon atrocity, blacks in the United States have felt a general easing of pressure. The congenital dread felt by most has been replaced, it seems, by a consciousness that now that Middle Eastern people are all "suspect," they provide new targets for the old game of pinning the tail on the donkey. Blacks, even more than whites, are now reportedly in favour of racial profiling to determine who is or is not likely to be carrying a penknife in his pockets and harbouring murderous un-American sentiments.
It is sad that the American society is so divided in normal times, that in times like these, groups of people turn so easily to find others to victimise. (It is also true in China which on Saturday banned all 'Middle-Eastern people', including Israelis, from their aeroplanes).
Many Americans will be cheered by statements such as those made by Mr Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defence: All he wants, he said, is that America should be able to continue to live and behave as it has always done.
Ex-President George H W Bush, cannot see that continuing as a partner in a consulting firm which advises the bin Laden family, may be a serious conflict of interest. But, as Calvin Coolidge said, long ago, "the business of America is business" and what is good for George Bush must be good for America, if I may resurrect the sentiments of Mr Charles Wilson, chairman of General Motors 40 years ago.
Corporate profiling
The European Parliament is now studying a complaint against several US corporations, including Unocal oil and the Halliburton Company, of which, until recently, Mr Dick Cheney, vice-president of the United States, was head.
During Mr Cheney's reign at Halliburton that company was not only in receipt of massive corporate welfare from the United States, it was also the beneficiary of forced labour in the forests of Burma where it was building an oil pipeline. Complaints to the EU parliament and to the International Labour Organisation suggest that Halliburton and Unocal must have been party to the brutalisation, murder and rape, which guaranteed their contracts and their profits in Burma.
Unfortunately, when ordinary Americans ask themselves why the US is so hated abroad, they lack the background knowledge of the brutal tactics of their government and their corporations in foreign countries over the years. The US press is increasingly owned by the largest corporations whose interests include forced labour, sweated labour and all kinds of sharp practice in foreign countries, little of which is ever reported in the United States.
It should therefore come as no surprise that the major American television networks tamely agreed to a US government request to censor the words of Osama bin Laden on the somewhat imaginative theory that he may be encoding terrorist instructions in his videos. The US had already tried to get the Arabic counterpart of CNN, the Al Jazeera network of Qatar, to censor bin Laden. They failed.
The problem is that as many people expected, the US is losing the propaganda war. It is almost impossible not to lose a propaganda war against an abstraction. Terrorism may, in the American view, be incarnated in Mr bin Laden, but getting rid of him will not end terrorism.
It must be becoming obvious to the major US planners that smart bombs on an empty landscape don't suggest a real war against anyone or anything. Besides which, as the stories of the deprivation and human misery of Afghanistan filter out, the whole exercise looks a little too much like bullying. Iraq was almost a credible antagonist, with tanks and SCUD missiles, while poison gas was always a danger. The Afghans have a few portable Stinger missiles and some Kalashnikov rifles, hardly likely to be effective against high flying bombers.
Bombing a myth
Having made Mr bin Laden into a myth, the warriors for freedom will find it very difficult to confine the myth even if they capture the man. In a way, to the Muslims of the world, it now hardly matters whether bin Laden is captured or killed. He is already up there with Saladin and nothing anyone can now do can unravel the effect of the millions of words spent by the Americans in making him into a kind of supernatural bogeyman.
Trying to "get" bin Laden, as the FBI got Al Capone, is impossible, and anyway, is sure to lead to further terrorist attacks. As I said in my first column on this subject, terrorists and/or "freedom fighters" do not need to be led, if they are sufficiently imbued with a righteous sense of injustice and grievance. It is, after all, perfectly possible that the WTC terrorists were a self-contained group, determined to do their bit for Allah and the greater glory of Islam. Did they really need a bin Laden?
The grievance and bitterness were there before bin Laden and will survive him. As long as the causes for this bitterness and grievance persist, so long will the destructive anger and the horrific self-sacrifices continue.
Fighting "terrorism" is fighting a symptom. The disease will continue as long as Corporate America continues to push the American state in the furtherance of its own, hidden agenda while concealing its true nature from its own people.
According to Greek mythology, the Hydra was a ferocious monster -- a beast three times as tall as a man, with the body of a hound and nine snakelike heads. So hideous was the Hydra that most people died of fright at the mere sight of it. Those who didn't die of fright were soon poisoned by its breath. Hercules, sentenced to seven labours to expiate his crimes, was given, as his second labour, the killing of the monster, a thing so horrific that it seemed to have been made of all the foulest thoughts conceived since time began. When Hercules confronted the Hydra, he discovered that every time he cut off one of its heads, two grew in its place. Hercules' nephew, Iolaus, had the bright idea of burning the stumps as Hercules chopped off each head. Thus cauterised, the stumps could not regenerate. The last head of the monster was, however, immortal, so when Hercules cut off that one, he buried it beneath a huge rock from which it could never escape.
Until now
The demonification of bin Laden is beginning to resemble some of the Hydra's publicity material. In the United States, impressionable people, brought up on a diet of horror movies and video games, have been ready to see the head of Satan in the smoke from the WTC towers. They will probably be having nightmares about bin Laden for years after he is dead and gone.
If terrorism is the modern Hydra, its immortal head may very well be the injustice from which most of the world suffers. It can't be buried under a rock -- even though bin Laden himself might very well be if an American bomb hits the right cave in Afghanistan.
But bombs can destroy neither myths nor injustice.
Copyright ©2001 John Maxwell
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CLR — Black Plato of our time
Posted: Wednesday, October 10, 2001
By Michael Delblond
This year is the centennial of the birth of our own C L R James and just as when he moved on "beyond the boundary", we can brace ourselves from a virtual deluge of encomiums from solicited as well as unsolicited sources of varying degrees of distinction and/or authority. It is also in the nature of things that some "glowing tributes" could well be thinly disguised, self-serving efforts to extract political mileage and attempt to glow in CLR's posthumous reflected glory.
Nevertheless, there are cogent reasons why we should wish to properly pay our national respects to one of our more gifted sons and perpetuate his memory in an appropriate way. That is not to say that James was either flawless or without his own "feet of clay".
CLR James is generally seen as a "self-made intellectual" who apparently turned his nose up at preparing himself for a free university education and refused to direct his efforts to winning the much-sought-after Island Scholarship which students of humble means saw as the "Open Sesame" to "fame and fortune" and the only alternative to some dead-end occupation which could have constituted the "graveyard of ambition".
I don't think people today are even dimly aware of the virtual absence of opportunities in days gone by for the bright young boy or girl, from the humbler walks of life, who aspired to a professional career in keeping with his/her intellectual potential.
In this respect, I call to mind Thomas Gray's lines:
"Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear; Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air."
I also ask myself, in respect of young CLR, "What could have been operating in the mind of this lad who at the tender age of nine or ten was reading — with much interest, one might add — the British Classics and was the youngest boy to win an "exhibition" (a scholarship to QRC) from an intensively competitive field?" It might be worth mentioning here that CLR's father was a primary school headmaster (a position, which in those days and for a black man, was an indication of great diligence, ambition and intelligence). CLR's mother was also a voracious reader of quality literature.
It therefore cannot be said that James lacked a nurturing environment or the stimuli for success and academic achievement.
By his own admission, Mr James had a consuming passion for cricket. He also saw Pan-Africanism as a self-appointed mission and had a vision of world revolutionary politics. He was a self-avowed Marxist. More specifically, he was a Trotskyite. Although he expressed misgivings about the presumed role of Blacks within the movement. James appeared to be his own man, with his own mind, and he wasn't susceptible to being pigeonholed. The idea that he was simply "a communist" and ipso facto "a dangerous subversive character" may well have been a political oversimplification.
In understanding CLR one has to examine his attitude to fame and fortune. He seemed, from all accounts I've heard, quite indifferent to the security that fortune brings. This may well have been at the back of a certain writer's mind who apparently sneered at one of CLR's return to the country of his birth as, "his being washed up on our shores," — a gratuitous insult, I thought at the time.
The only items that I can figure out being washed up on any shores are the flotsam and jetsam of some wreckage at sea. Perhaps, having been bitten by the "political bug" James never became the prolific novelist that he might have been, with a comfortable livelihood ensured by the exercise of his craft.
One can perhaps surmise that young CLR was, initially, instinctively persuaded that a university education might just have got in the way of his real education and stultify his intellectual development or he had grasped the point that "education" and "qualification" were not necessarily synonymous with "formal accreditation." In today's world university professors are virtually "a dime a dozen" and one can think of cases where a dozen aren't worth a dime.
CLR (as he is popularly known) went on to create an international reputation for himself, to the point that he was once described by the “TIMES” of London as "... the black Plato of our generation and one of the most versatile intellectuals." In an obituary, the prestigious London newspaper, "THE INDEPENDENT" hailed James as probably the most versatile and accomplished Afro-American intellectual of the 20th Century."
Although there has been and, I imagine, will continue to be an unofficial competition to dredge "superlatives" to capture the quintessential character of the multifaceted talent of this extraordinary man, the comment that I found most apt was that of an E P Thompson which went like this: "It is not a question of whether one agrees with everything he (James) has said or done; but everything has had the mark of originality, of his own flexible and deeply cultured intelligence ... the intelligence has always been matched by a warm and outgoing personality." There was every reason to believe that Mr James was well-respected and highly regarded abroad and I rather suspect that it must have been a sore point with him that he had not been accorded the recognition and courtesies, at home, commensurate with his international stature.
He was subsequently awarded the Trinity Cross and an honorary UWI Doctorate. The government of the day committed itself to underwriting all expenses for his return from England and his medical and other needs. He was then, however, too weak to travel and died soon after. His mortal remains lie buried in Tunapuna from which he hails. His self-imposed exile and bitter quarrel with PM Dr Eric Williams will be the subject of a future article.
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The debt has not been paid, the accounts have not been settled
Posted: Monday, October 8, 2001
By Dudley Thompson
First of all, I want to thank the students and those who are responsible for giving me the chance to participate in these "streets of intellect." Listening to George Lamming alone is worth the trip. I hope you will agree with me on that.
I will begin with a quotation that could have come from Walter Rodney himself. Actually it is a quotation from George Lamming. It goes like this:
There is a perennial debt to be paid to black people for continuing of enslavement and degradation. There are those who believe that the matter is over. They are completely wrong. Actually, there are those among us who believe that the demand and struggle for justice and restoration to full dignity would take a generation to win a crusade for reparations. In unison under concerted strategy....
There are other words of inspiration along the same lines, for instance Kwame Nkrumah has said: "We can no longer afford the luxury of delay"; and as I have stated elsewhere, "The debt has not been paid; the accounts have not been settled." MORE
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Algeria: Ethnic Berbers have rebuffed concessions
Posted: Thursday, October 4, 2001
ABSTRACT BBC: - Ethnic Berbers have rebuffed a series of concessions offered by the Algerian Government, including recognition of their language, and have vowed to press ahead with a mass rally.
Berber leaders from the Kabylie region say the offer falls short of their demands, and that the government is trying to engineer a split in their long-running campaign for official recognition and justice.
President Abdelaiz Bouteflika, who has portrayed the concessions as ground-breaking, hoped the offer would persuade the community to call off their demonstration on Friday.
Previous demonstrations of this kind have attracted hundreds of thousands of people. In June a protest which included many non-Berbers degenerated into rioting.
The Berbers' dissatisfaction with the offer is reportedly based on the exact wording of the text.
They want their language - Tamazight - to be classified as an official language of the state, giving it equal status with the majority language of Arabic.
But they say the government is offering to make amendments to the constitution which would merely recognize the Berber language as a national language of Algeria.
The Berbers are also suspicious about the wording of additional government offers over legal procedures against police suspected of killing Berber civilians.
Algerian paramilitary police are accused of shooting dead some 60 Berbers during the recent unrest.
An official inquiry has already judged that the deaths were a result of police over-reaction to peaceful protests.
Concessions to the Berbers have been strongly opposed by powerful circles in the majority Arab community, in particular the military, as well as by the Islamist movement.
Since independence from France in 1962, the majority Arab community has maintained that Arabic must be the sole language to be recognised by the state.
That has always been regarded as an affront by the Berbers, who claim to represent over a quarter of the population and say their culture and language are distinct.
These people call themselves Amazigh. "Berber is a name that has been given them by others and which they themselves do not use. Amazigh history in North Africa is extensive and diverse. Their ancient ancestors settled in the area just inland of the Medeterranean Sea to the east of Egypt. Many early Roman, Greek, and Phoenician colonial accounts mention a group of people collectively known as Berbers living in northern Africa. In actuality, Berber is a generic name given to numerous heterogeneous ethnic groups that share similar cultural, political, and economic practices. Over the last several hundred years many Berber peoples have converted to Islam.
Contrary to popular romanticism which portrays Amazigh as nomadic peoples crossing the desert on camels, most actually practice sedentary agriculture in the mountains and valleys throughout northern Africa. Some do, in fact, engage in trade throughout the region, and such practices certainly had a tremendous influence on the history of the African continent. Trade routes established from western Africa to the Mediterranean connected the peoples of southern Europe with much of sub-Saharan Africa thousands of years ago. There are basically five trade routes which extend across the Sahara from the northern Mediterranean coast of Africa to the great cities, which are situated on the southern edge of the Sahara. Berber merchants were responsible for bringing goods from these cities to the north. From there they were distributed throughout the world.
http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/people/Berber.html
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Understanding Gandhi
Posted: Wednesday, October 3, 2001
( Akinkawon ) ABSTRACT: Gandhi7495
SUMMARY: To understand Gandhi's role towards the blacks, one requires a knowledge of Hinduism. Within the constraints, a few words on Hinduism will suffice: The caste is the bedrock of Hinduism. The Hindu term for caste is varna; which means arranging the society on a four-level hierarchy based on the skin color: The darker-skinned relegated to the lowest level, the lighter-skinned to the top three levels of the apartheid scale called the Caste System. The race factor underlies the intricate workings of Hinduism, not to mention the countless evil practices embedded within. Have no doubt, Gandhi loved the Caste system.
Gandhi lived in South Africa for roughly twenty one years from 1893 to 1914. In 1906, he joined the military with a rank of Sergeant-Major and actively participated in the war against the blacks. Gandhi's racist ideas are also evident in his writings of these periods. One should ask a question : Were our American Black leaders including Dr. King aware of Gandhi's anti-black activities? Painfully, we have researched the literature and the answer is, no. For this lapse, the blame lies on the Afro-American newspapers which portrayed Gandhi in ever glowing terms, setting the stage for African-American leaders Howard Thurman, Sue Baily Thurman, Reverend Edward Carroll, Benjamin E. Mays, Channing H. Tobias, and William Stuart Nelson to visit India at different time periods to meet Gandhi in person. None of these leaders had any deeper understanding of Hinduism, British India, or the complexities of Gandhi's convoluted multi-layered Hindu mind. Frankly speaking, these leaders were no match to Gandhi's deceit; Gandhi hoodwinked them all, and that too, with great ease. Understanding of Hindu India with our black leaders never really improved even considering years later in March 1959, much after Gandhi's death, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., his wife, and Professor Lawrence D. Reddick visited India and to our way of analysis, they fared no better than their predecessors. We are certain, had Dr. King known Gandhi's anti-black and other criminal activities, he would have distanced his civil-rights movement away from the name of Gandhi. full article...
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( RootsWomb(man) ) Peace,
Give thanks for this article. Thought I'd forward some more information on the MYTH of Ghandi from "The Global African Presence" site by Ranuko Rashidi: http://www.cwo.com/~lucumi/gandhi.html
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( Mica ) He may have been racist but the message of passive resistance does not change. As long as he was not oppressing blacks I'm fine with him. its not like people knew him for his equal rights ideas, people liked him for his anti-violence ideas. Marcus Garvey did not believe Selassie was Jah, but that's no reason to not like him...
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( Steve ) That is a ridiculously mentally lazy response. If you took you time to learn history you may realize that Ghandi’s was disrespectful and oppressive to all Black and African people.
If you separate parts of his words from his conduct and ended up with your comment, you are a supporter of hypocrisy. A hypocrite is not a role model.
Incidentally Garvey was trying to get Africans to move from mental dependency and he was quite right to deny Selassie was Jah if Jah means the perfect spirit. Salassie surely was not perfect in thoughts and actions.
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( Akinkawon ) Rather harsh but very correct comment in my view. You would not become popular with that.
I suspect the problem is the same lack of historical perspective where people do not evaluate for themselves. But how can they if they do not have a good idea of what is the self.
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( IanI ) Sincerest Greetings Bredren an Sistren
IanI Rastafari as a POSITIVE One allways look to see the Truth. I also do the best me can to be overstanding and generous. Seen.
No One has absolute perfection and all are subject to the conditions into which they have been born. For some there be the ability to transend those conditions, for others there is no such a thing. I shall allways be generous to them that seek that transendance, even if them fail. This is generosity.
Mr. Gandhi:
"I am conscious of my own limitations. That consciousness is my only strength. Whatever I might have been able to do in my life has proceeded more than anything else out of my own limitations."
"Life is governed by a multitude of forces. It would be smooth sailing, if one could determine the course of one's actions only by one general principle whose application at a given moment was too obvious to need a moments reflection. But I cannot recall a single act which could be so easily determined."
"My position regarding the government is TOTALLY different today and hence I should not voluntarily participate in its wars and I should risk imprisonment and even the gallows if I were FORCED to take up arms or otherwise participate in its military operations."
"Language at best is but a poor vehicle for expressing one's thoughts in full. I know I fail often... it is a matter not of the intellect but of the Heart. True guidance comes by the constant waiting upon God, by utmost humility. It's practice requires fearlessness and courage of the Highest order. I am PAIN-FULLY aware of my failings."
"I know that war is wrong, is an unmitigated evil. I know too that it has got to go. I firmly believe that freedom won through bloodshed or fraud is no freedom."
"The more I reflect and look back on the past, the more vividly do I feel my limitations."
" I have gone through deep self-introspection, searched myself through and through, and examined and analysed every psychological situation. Yet I am far from claiming any finality or infallibility."
"There is no such thing as 'Gandhism' and I do not want to leave any sect after me. I do not claim to have originated any new principle or doctrine. I have simply TRIED in my own way to apply the eternal Truths to our daily life and problems. I have nothing new to teach the world. I have sometimes erred and learnt by my errors. There is no 'ism' about it."
"My imperfections and my failures are as much a blessing from God as my success and my talents, and I lay them both at His feet."
One can allways search anothers Life and find errors and failings. One can allways find them worst transgressions and build upon them. It is a great accomplishment when One can see them own and try to fix them, successfully or failingly. Life be a journey and experience brings Wisdom to them that seek it. Some achieve greater Wisdom than others. Some achieve Wisdom in one area of Life and not in another. Some do evil in the younger days of them Life and come to Realization when older and work to change them ways... others do not.
IanI Rastafari will allways seek the POSITIVE view and hope for an expansion of the consciousness of LOVE. Mr. Gandhi's racism may well have been what drove him to his continued striving for a more perfect world. His realizations of his failings gave him reason and direction to attempt a change, however erred those changes may be, or simply seem to others. It is those that DENY them own weaknesses and faults, and continue in arrogance that inevitably destroy and 'conquer' those they see as 'less than' them own selves. When IanI do not strive to reason and realize the ways for which humanity goes astray, to overstand the people and work towards solving the problems of society, with generosity and patience... there is war. A situation many find themselves in at this very moment. War. Violence. And not overstanding and guidance.
Racism is a scourge that has been pounded into the minds of the innocent for long, long ages now. IanI see a light beginning to SHINE. It is to that Light that IanI will forward. Continuing in the supreme effort to free the minds of the racists from them horrific brainwashment so that IanI People may live Free and unafraid.
Praises unto the Almighty Most High
Give Thanks.
IanI Rastafari
Guidance and Protection
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( Akinkawon ) I posted that article because many people speak as if Gandhi was the highest moral example and quite clearly he was not.
I feel assured that many people do not take the time to study the lives of people whom they consider heroes and in so doing they fail to grasp the shortcomings in the personalities. There is a popular misconception that people should not examine the shortcomings of popular personalities and this is the reason they fail to rise above them.
Gandhi was not only low in understanding, but he said nothing that was original. He went to school, a right most others did not have and he would have grasped some of the more eloquent concepts in history, but the pacifist attitude that he is used to symbolize is part of the problem.
Whenever poor people are aggrieved, the media suddenly focuses on Gandhi and Martin Luther King as symbols of poor struggle. What they are trying to crystallize in the minds of the aggrieved is that they must remain non-violent while the aggressors, usually the Leaders in the society uses violence against them.
For those who understand African American struggles, there would have been no hero named Martin Luther King without the radical actions of the Black Panthers. Very often this is not appreciated. While I myself do not support using violence to address issues, I implore people to know the difference between self-defense on a human level and poorly contrived acts of aggression.
For what Gandhi symbolized and achieved during his time he should be thrown into the dustbin of history, as he offered no insightful means to end oppression and violence in India and anywhere else. His disrespect and ignorance of Africans kept him from understanding the Caste system in India and intelligently intervening to offer equity to all people.
Can people learn from him? Yes, only when they examine the entire history of Gandhi, clearly see his shortcomings and by not repeating them.
I know many people may be angered by my comments and they are entitled to their anger but my comments will stand the test of history and time.
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Me big chief
Posted: Monday, October 1, 2001
By Bukka Rennie
October 01, 2001
Haiti, the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere, paid reparations to France to the tune of 150 million in "gold francs". Imagine paying reparations for having won your independence in one of the bloodiest episodes in modern history. The oppressed compensating the oppressor for their freedom.
That was a shock to many in the audience at the recently-held CLR James conference who may not have been so informed previously.
Haiti is what it is today because of the numerous compounded negative effects it faced, such as the deliberate political and economic non-recognition by all the then major nations of the world, coupled, of course, with the geometric effect of having to pay such severe reparations.
That is a historic fact. But why the surprise? The white planters in the English-speaking Caribbean were the ones compensated to the tune of some £200 million for the loss of slave labour. The ex-slaves got nothing. Similarly, the rice and cotton planters of the southern states of America were likewise compensated after slavery was abolished.
The Euro-centrics have always sought reparation and compensation for their "kith and kin" wherever they may be and whatever may have been the disaster suffered. Similarity of treatment to those of us who are not of their kith and kin has never been their agenda.
The First Peoples of the Americas, the so-called Red Indians, culturally were of an entirely different view of the world to that of the British and Europeans with whom they clashed. The First Peoples had no concept of private ownership of the physical and natural environment.
"How can you own the rivers and the trees and the animals around? Can you own the air we breathe and all these things so necessary for living?"
Questions to that effect were posed by Chief Seattle and Chief Crazy Horse. And they were not afraid to die for their cause. They lost eventually and paid the ultimate price. Genocide and disappearance of their civilisation.
Reparations in any form to the minority groups of them still existing have never been considered. What is fundamental though is that they exist in an environment today in which there are mechanisms for sustainable development.
The people of Haiti were also not afraid to die, they embraced the modern concepts of "liberty, fraternity and equality" and fought the French Europeans to establish these principles. They won and yet they were made to pay and are still paying in different ways as they work out the essential mechanisms.
The USA's role in all of this is documented history even as she grew up and matured as a country projected as the bastion of freedom and democracy. But how could such a country at this time, in today's world, have the audacity to walk out of the Durban Conference on the question of reparations for the descendants of slavery that existed on their shores for well over 300 years? The simple answer is that black people are not considered their "kith and kin".
The point being made in the two previous columns is that America needs to review its foreign policies and its positions in relation to the rest of the world. And not only because of the events of October 11 when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked. The necessity existed all along.
Real enlightened, visionary leadership would have seen to that since the '60s when for the first time every aspect and facet of world civilisation, Eastern as well as Western, was put to question by conscious youth and progressive working-class forces everywhere.
In many instances, it was the skewed tenets of American foreign policy that served, inadvertently or not, to prop up all kinds of crazy, backward regimes such as that of fundamentalist "mullahs" with their anachronistic feudal political structures reminiscent of the Middle Ages, or even that of modern brutal dictatorships as existed in Chile and Panama and the Philippines.
What is ironic is that some of these very backward regimes would in the long run turn against America and foster popular hostilities against her when it seemed to be in their narrow economic interests to do so, eg the Taliban and Iraqi regimes.
While all this is happening the masses of people therein are deliberately kept hungry and trapped in some twilight time zone mouthing and screaming emotional epithets, and at the same time their progressive strata are effectively isolated and quietly but brutally liquidated.
Look, we have been saying over and over that America has a particular responsibility. Precisely because she is now the only super-power and that power must be exercised and be wielded with a firm sense of morality. The "person" or "nation" placed for whatever reason on a pedestal has to bear the greatest moral burden before the rest of the world.
Borges, the Argentine writer, claims that America is a country that has assigned to herself the name of an entire continent. If such is the case, is she to look or to continue to look upon the rest of the continent as her personal "backyard"?
We said in the column "War of the flea", that America "represents a benchmark in humanity's long march and the point is that no one wants to be left out..." A "benchmark" is a stage that measures or denotes significant and fundamental accomplishment and achievement.
America is the country that has taken the present prevalent mode of production, distribution and consumption to its highest levels. She manages and controls the global market and she is the one that profits the most from globalisation. It is a mode that warrants all the basic freedoms, including the freedom of choice and the right to the pursuit of knowledge and happiness.
In relative terms it is the mode of production that has extended the democratic process the furthest. All the known modes of the past, eg tribalism, communalism, feudalism, slavery, early capitalism and all its degenerate totalitarian variants, ie state capitalism/socialism, fascism, etc, have to one extent or another been hindrances to the democratic processes and been major blots on humanity's long march towards universal freedom.
America, just as she has assigned the name of a whole continent to herself, has likewise assigned to herself and her system, "Democracy" (with a capital "D"), as if to suggest that she is equivalent to the be-all and end-all of humanity's quest for complete fulfilment.
Nothing is further from the truth. Yet she is today a benchmark of modernity and what is supposed to accompany that is a moral burden and a moral responsibility; mess that up and the hostility towards America will intensify. Just as happens when any big chief anywhere betrays the moral trust.
There is this standing joke in our favoured "watering hole" in Tunapuna: Put two airplanes on the tarmac in any underdeveloped country in the world and say that one is bound for "America" and the other to anywhere else and see which of the two airplanes would be filled to capacity.
No one wants, nor is it possible, to destroy this benchmark of humanity's collective travail. All and sundry want to be part of it though on mutually beneficial terms and all wish to be respected for whatever unique particularity they may bring to the common agenda.
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Speech given by Cuban President Fidel Castro on Sept. 22
Posted: Sunday, September 30, 2001
CUBAN PRESIDENT FIDEL CASTRO:
"THE TRAGEDY SHOULD NOT BE USED TO RECKLESSLY START A WAR"
No one can deny that terrorism is today a dangerous and ethically indefensible phenomenon, which should be eradicated regardless of its deep origins, the economic and political factors that brought it to live, and those responsible for it.
The unanimous irritation caused by the human and psychological damage brought on the American people by the unexpected and shocking death of thousands of innocent people whose images have shaken the world is perfectly understandable. But who have profited? The extreme right,
the most backward and right-wing forces, those in favor of crushing the growing world rebellion and sweeping away everything progressive that is still left on the planet. It was an enormous error, a huge injustice and a great crime, whoever organized or are responsible for such action.
However, the tragedy should not be used to recklessly start a war that could actually unleash an endless carnage of innocent people, all under the peculiar and bizarre name of "Infinite Justice."
In the last few days we have seen the hasty establishment of the basis, the concept, the true purposes, the spirit and the conditions for such a war. No one would be able to affirm that it was not something thought out well in advance, something that was just waiting for its chance to materialize. Those who, after the so-called end of the Cold War, continued a military build-up and the development of
the most sophisticated means to kill and exterminate human beings were aware that their large military investments would give them the privilege to impose an absolute and complete dominance over the other peoples of the world. The ideologists of the imperialist system knew very well what they were doing and why they were doing it.
After the shock and sincere sorrow felt by every people on Earth for the atrocious and insane terrorist attack that targeted the American people, the most extremist ideologists and the most belligerent hawks, already established in privileged power positions, have taken command of the most powerful country in the world, whose military and technological capabilities would seem infinite. Actually, its capacity to destroy and kill is enormous, while its inclination towards equanimity, serenity, thoughtfulness and restraint is minimal.
The combination of elements--including complicity and the common enjoyment of privileges--the prevailing opportunism, confusion and panic make it almost impossible to avoid a bloody and unpredictable outcome.e.
The first victims of whatever military actions are undertaken will be the billions of people living in the poor and underdeveloped world, with their unbelievable economic and social problems, their unpayable debts and the ruinous prices of their basic commodities; their growing natural and ecological catastrophes, their hunger and misery, the
massive undernourishment of their children, teenagers and adults, their terrible AIDS epidemic, their malaria, their tuberculosis and their infectious diseases that threaten whole nations with extermination.
The grave economic world crisis was already a real and irrefutable fact affecting absolutely every one of the big economic power centers. Such crisis will inevitably grow deeper under the new circumstances, and when it becomes unbearable for the overwhelming majority of the peoples, it will bring chaos, rebellion and the impossibility to govern.
But the price will also be unpayable for the rich countries. For years to come it would be impossible to speak strongly enough about the environment and ecology, or about ideas and research done and tested, or about projects for the protection of nature--because that space and possibility would be taken by military actions, war and crimes as infinite as "Infinite Justice," that is, the name given to the war operation to be unleashed..
Can there be any hope left after having listened, hardly 36 hours ago, to the speech made by the president before the U.S. Congress?
I will avoid the use of adjectives, qualifiers or offensive words towards the author of that speech. They would be absolutely unnecessary and untimely when the tensions and seriousness of the moment advise thoughtfulness and equanimity. I will limit myself to underline some short phrases that say it all:
"We will use every necessary weapon of war."
"Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen."
"Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists."
"I've called the armed forces to alert and there is a reason. The hour is coming when America will act and you will make us proud."
"This is the world's fight, this is civilization's fight."
"I ask for your patience [...] in what will be a long struggle."
"The great achievement of our time and the great hope of every time, now depend on us."
"The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. [...] And we know that God is not neutral."
I ask our fellow countrymen to meditate deeply and calmly on the ideas contained in several of the above-mentioned
phrases:
Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.
No nation of the world has been left out of the dilemma, not even the big and powerful states; none has escaped the threat of war or attacks.
We will use any weapon.
No procedure has been excluded, regardless of ethics, or any threat, however fatal--either nuclear, chemical, biological or any other..
It will not be short combat but a lengthy war, lasting many years, unparalleled in history.
It is the world's fight; it is civilization's fight.
The achievements of our times and the hope of every time, now depend on us.
Finally, an unheard of confession in a political speech on the eve of a war, and no less than in times of apocalyptic risks:
The course of this conflict is not known; yet its outcome is certain. And we know that God is not neutral.
This is an amazing assertion. When I think about the real or imagined parties involved in that bizarre holy war that is about to begin, I find it difficult to make a distinction about where fanaticism is stronger.
On Thursday, before the United States Congress, the idea was sketched out of a world military dictatorship under the exclusive rule of force, irrespective of any international laws or institutions. The United Nations Organization, simply ignored in the present crisis, would fail to have any authority or prerogative whatsoever. There would be only one boss, only one judge, and only one law.
We have all been ordered to ally either with the United States government or with terrorism.
Cuba, the country that has suffered the most and the longest from terrorist actions, the one whose people are not afraid of anything because there is no threat or power in the world that can intimidate it--with a high morale, Cuba claims that it is opposed to terrorism and opposed to war. Although the possibilities are now remote, Cuba reaffirms the need to avert a war of unpredictable consequences whose very authors have admitted not having the least idea of how the events
will unfold. Likewise, Cuba reiterates its willingness to cooperate with every country in the total eradication of terrorism..
An objective and calm friend should advise the United States government against throwing young American soldiers into an uncertain war in remote, isolated and inaccessible places, like a fight against ghosts, not knowing where they are or even if they exist or not, or whether the people they kill are or are not responsible for the death of their innocent fellow countrymen killed in the United States.
Cuba will never declare itself an enemy of the American people, who are today subjected to an unprecedented campaign to sow hatred and a vengeful spirit, so much so that even the music that sings of peace has been banned. On the contrary, Cuba will make that music its own, and even our children will sing their songs to peace while the announced bloody war lasts.
Whatever happens, the territory of Cuba will never be used for terrorist actions against the American people and we will do everything within our reach to prevent such actions against that people. Today we are expressing our solidarity while urging to peace and calmness. One day they will admit we were right.
We will defend our independence, our principles and our social achievements with honor to the last drop of blood if we are attacked!
It will not be easy to fabricate pretexts to do it. They are already talking about a war using all the necessary weapons, but it will be good to recall that not even that would be a new experience. Almost four decades ago, hundreds of strategic and tactical nuclear weapons were aimed at Cuba and nobody remembers any one in our country sleepless over that.
We are the same sons and daughters of that heroic people, with a patriotic and revolutionary conscience that is higher than ever. It is time for serenity and courage.
The world will grow aware of this and will raise its voice in the face of the terrible threatening drama that it is about to suffer.
As for Cubans, this is the right time to proclaim more proudly and resolutely than ever:
Socialism or death!
Homeland or death!
We shall overcome!
- END -
(Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: ww@workers.org. For subscription info send message to: info@workers.org. Web: http://www.workers.org)
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