50 Years After Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" Speech—Amerikkka Is Still A Goddamn Nightmare!
3 Points and a Challenge in Response to Obama's Speech!
by Carl Dix | August 28, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
1) Barack Obama stepped to the mic and spoke of the importance of non-violence … for oppressed people. When any representative of the U.S. ruling class preaches non-violence, they mean non-violence for those who might get in the way of their empire. Obama was referring to people who had suffered under Jim Crow segregation and lynch-mob terror. This from the commander-in-chief of the global Amerikkkan empire, who has presided over more than 280 drone missile strikes, maintains a torture chamber prison at Guantánamo Bay and presides over a criminal injustice system that is carrying out a slow genocide aimed at Blacks and Latinos. There might as well have been blood dripping from his jaws as he spoke.
2) Obama said: "If we're honest with ourselves, we'll admit that during the course of 50 years, there were times when some of us, claiming to push for change, lost our way. The anguish of assassinations set off self-defeating riots." That's Bull Shit! People didn't lose their way in the '60s: In fact, they were beginning to find their way, coming to see that the horrors they were up against were built into the very fabric of this set-up and couldn't be reformed away. But they were met with vicious repression—leaders assassinated, activists dragged into court on trumped-up charges, and railroaded off to prison and more. In the face of all that, the movement of that period wasn't able to develop the understanding needed to do what was needed: make revolution and end the horrors Amerikkka enforced on humanity then and continues to enforce today.
3) Many, many people are asking big questions about the unjust nature of this system, and this has forced Obama to speak to some of the problems Black people face today. But he doesn't get into the depths of these problems or what to do about them, except to say rely on him to work on them. For example, he didn't say a fucking word about the more than two million people warehoused in prison. He did say that the unemployment rate for African-Americans has consistently been about twice that of whites and that the wealth gap between Blacks and whites has GROWN over the past decades. But he talked about this like it had nothing to do with the system he presides over.
THE CHALLENGE—There is a way to uproot all these horrors. It'll take Revolution—Nothing Less! I speak to this in depth in a recent talk: "We Don't Need a New Civil Rights Movement—We Need Revolution!" Watch that talk at revcom.us. And dig into BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!
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