A demonstration in London’s Trafalgar Square on May 31 in response to the death of George Floyd. Source: Vox
THE opinion one wrote for this week was “African Root of Medicine”. But the phenomenally massive protests ongoing across the cities in the US and the indignation across the world against the racist and cruel police murder of George Floyd changed the story line!
Will the new wave of protests change the American racist culture for a new culture of humanity for all races in the US to exist without racial and religious duscrimination and prejudices?
Will there emerge in the US a new culture that would promote and respect justice, human lives, and above all, respect for sovereign nations, whose rights to independence are continuously being undermined by the American military industrial complex?
Events that would unfold between now and November 2020 to elect a new American President would be decisive on whether the American public have learnt some lessons!
There are enough reasons in Nigeria to rise for adequate funding of public education at all levels, to join forces in the current struggle of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and other unions in the education sector to collaborate with the doctors and health workers for the upgrade of health facilities and insist on its public funding and to agitate for basic social welfare for the poor masses. That’s the big lesson we can learn from the American protests and to challenge ourselves that we should no longer be indifferent to the realities within and around us!
The massive protests, so far, have set new records in American history, and perhaps globally.
One; that all races can live and struggle as one united force in the spirit of a non-exploitative society against injustices, either committed against black, coloured or white.
Two; that all forms of police brutality and disrespect for human lives across the world are distinctive acts of state violence in furtherance of capitalist exploitation that must be fought and defeated.
And three; that popular anger and revulsion against the murder shattered the barriers of Coronavirus lockdowns and social distancing to organise a resilient resistance!
A stanza in the Solidarity Song for the working class is rendered as: “when the union inspiration through the workers blood shall run, there can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun…” Hence, since the Coronavirus pandemic couldn’t stop the American people from rising in unison on Floyd’s murder against the racist American establishment, it is now a challenge to those who are human in Africa and Nigeria to be inspired by the legitimate demands of the working people and oppressed poor for meaningful life existence, coupled with the factor of “Hungervirus” and “Sufferingvirus” to move to the barricades!
There are enough reasons in Nigeria to rise for adequate funding of public education at all levels, to join forces in the current struggle of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and other unions in the education sector to collaborate with the doctors and health workers for the upgrade of health facilities and insist on its public funding and to agitate for basic social welfare for the poor masses. That’s the big lesson we can learn from the American protests and to challenge ourselves that we should no longer be indifferent to the realities within and around us!
Fighting Coronavirus shouldn’t be an excuse to be passive in the fight against capitalist-virus attacks against the working people in the formal and informal sectors and the majority poor population.
And Now to the Bigger Picture!
The foreign policy of the American establishment is racist. Its domestic policy is racist. Its cultural space in football and other sports is racist! It isn’t about anyone profiling it; it is about what the American establishment itself institutionalised right from its foundation, without pretence to its claim to freedom, democracy and human rights.
Racism is America in the post-Christopher Columbus America! The Anglo-Americans since their mass migration into their self-conceited “New World,” have systematically destroyed the American natives – that is, the American Indians and the Black, before America and constituted themselves as the establishment!
Their history is about violence, it is about arrogance and race superiority and despite the lofty ideals expressed in the preface to the 1776 American Declaration of Independence; the Anglo-American establishment remains racist in all facets of relations with the rest of the world!
The foreign policy of the American establishment is racist. Its domestic policy is racist. Its cultural space in football and other sports is racist! It isn’t about anyone profiling it; it is about what the American establishment itself institutionalised right from its foundation, without pretence to its claim to freedom, democracy and human rights.
The Declaration states: “We hold these truth to be self-evident that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are the rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. And to pursue these rights, government is instituted among them, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed…” But the American establishment has always pretended it believes in rights but racism and might are its operational words and in spite of the constitutional declaration of 1776, slavery continued in the US for another 85 years until the 1861-65 American Civil War that brought about the Emancipation Act.
The establishment is so racist-centred that against all odds, its agenda is to always bring to power racist elements and war mongers as president, with Donald Trump as its latest hard-core representative!
We can examine few of its infamous records of criminalities in the past hundred years! First, was on the use of the Atomic Bomb in Asia. The scientists who took part in the atomic bomb project believed it was to be used against Hitlerite Germany and military targets and not to target the civilian population but what happened? The bomb was used against Japanese population and not targeted at the military infrastructure!
The hypocrisy embedded in the American national philosophy, symbolised by its rampant racism, became glaring in the bomb project as reported in the “THE EINSTEIN FILE”. A passage therein reads: “Once the decision was made to build an atomic bomb, the FDR Administration recruited the talents to do it – wherever that talent came from. Faced with either an American bomb made by (some) Red and pink scientists or no bomb, the choice was clear. Later, once the bomb had been produced, tested and presented to the government, the scientists who made it were as disposable as red wrapping paper on a Christmas gift.”
From the official media establishment in US as was reported in the book, “more than 98% of the US press editorials welcomed the news from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The nation’s keynote editorial in the New York Times blamed the Japanese. Throughout the war, racist terms and caricatures of a skant-eyed, bucktoothed enemy appeared frequently in editorials and cartoons on Hiroshima. The Philadelphia Inquirer denounced the ‘whining, whimpering, complaining Japs.’”
Racism became so deep rooted to the heart of US establishment to the point that even left wing elements and their mediums were also credited with what became unbelievable editorials but that was the truth. For instance, a left-leaning paper, The PM, called for dropping “a few” atom bombs on Tokyo “to clear the bases for democracy after the war.” Even the Communist Party’s Daily Worker was recorded to have cheered with its editorial: “We are lucky to have found The Thing (the atom bombs) and that we are able to speed the war against the Japanese before the enemy can develop counter-measures.”
The reaction of African-Americans when such issue as the murder of Floyd arose have been based on centuries of physical violence, psychological and mental torture that they have been compelled to undergo under the American racial realities! What is significant now is that people of all races are coming together to combat the American racist establishment. And hoping that the November 2020 election would make a difference because the emergence and reign of Trump is soiled with racist affirmatives!
The African-American believed the bombing of Hiroshima was racist and on the bomb project, the report was emphatic: “the 7,000 black workers at the Manhattan project lived in segregated, inferior housing, performed menial jobs only, with no school provided for their children, (unlike for the white workers), the paper asserted the United States had spared the Germans, who after all, represent the white race. But the bomb was used against the Japanese considered the hated yellow race of the Pacific!
The American establishment never see anything subversive about the Ku Klux Khan, American Nazi Party, white supremacy formations, anti-Semitic attacks, mob lynching of Blacks, etc. It is the extension of the American and British racist establishment that forced the creation of the State of Israel and crises in the Middle East!
Memories of Malcolm X become very relevant at this moment in terms of the necessity for the unity of the working class movement and the Pan-African forces to officially report the American racist establishment to the United Nations, encourage massive protests and nationwide mobilisation to stop all racist candidates in all US elections! Racism must be declared a crime against Humanity and racist characters like President Trump should be charged to the International Court of Justice for presiding and supporting a racially divided society.
The words of Einstein to the Lincoln University audience in 1946 are instructive: “Their sense of equality and human dignity is mainly limited to men of white skins. Even among these, there are prejudices of which I as a Jew am clearly conscious; but they are unimportant in comparison with the attitude of “Whites” towards their fellow-citizens of darker complexion, particularly towards Negroes…”
Comrade Aremu, Co-Coordinator Amilcar Cabral Ideological School (ACIS-M) Movement is National Record’s Columnist on Tuesday.
