|
Comment on this article |
View comments |
Email this Article
|
|
Announcement :: Organizing |
|
General Interest Meeting/ Political Study for the Uhuru Movement/APSC |
|
by Rob Notowitz
Email: robapsc (nospam) excite.com (verified) |
15 Jun 2006
|
|
|
|
The African People’s Solidarity Committee (APSC) is currently organizing in Boston. APSC is a program created by and under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party and is a function of the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM). APSC provides a program for the white community to recognize our responsibility for the conditions experienced by colonized and oppressed peoples, both within the US and the world over, and provides the principled means to oppose said conditions. For more on APSC and Uhuru check out www.apscuhuru.org
On Wednesday, June 21st we are holding a general interest meeting at The Democracy Center (Zine Library) at 45 Mt. Auburn St., Harvard Square, Cambridge. The meeting starts at 8pm. Anyone who considers themselves a person of principle should come to this meeting, you won’t be sorry you did.
Rob Notowitz
Uhuru Means Freedom! |
This work is in the public domain |
Please Don't Feed the Trolls
Wikipedia defines an Internet Troll as: "An Internet troll is either a person who sends messages on the Internet hoping to entice other users into angry or fruitless responses, or a message sent by such a person." Boston IMC strives to provide both a grassroots media resource as well as a forum for people to contribute to a meaningful discussion about local issues. Please, when posting comments, be respectful of others and ignore those trying to interrupt or discourage meaningful discourse. Thank you.
-- Boston Indymedia volunteers
Add a CommentDue to on going anti spam work quick comments are currently broken please use the full comment form. We do hope to have quick comments back on line soon. Comments
|
WHITE GUILT TRIPPING IS NOT SOCIALIST |
by Liam
(No verified email address) |
16 Jun 2006
|
The idea that people who happen to have ‘white’ skin are some kind of moral underclass that should be punished for social wrongs committed by people who looked like them in the past is not new. As indicated above, this is called “White Guilt Tripping.”
What happens to someone who takes up this idea for a while is that they eventually wake up and leave left/progressive politics. A good example of this trajectory is the now Right Wing theorist David Horowitz. (See http://www.thenation.com/doc/20000703/sherman)
Horowitz was brought up in a leftist household where the rights of black people were defended when that was not a popular position. His parents were Communists and had some knowledge of Black History. The authorities eventually got them fired from teaching jobs. Horowitz became a leftist student activist and wrote a book about campus left wing activism called “Student” that sold 25,000 copies in the early 60’s.
Like many young leftists whose parents were Stalinists, Horowitz was attracted by the seeming radicalism of Maoist China and the call for Third World people to take the initiative to build a better socialist world. The impression was that since workers in the US, or Europe, were not revolutionary, progressives must look to the “Retched of the Earth” in poor countries to make new revolutions. White people in the advanced countries could, at best, be cheerleaders for the real revolutionaries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America
In ‘74 Horowitz met Black Panther leader Huey Newton, who had just returned from China. A heated argument about the revolutionary virtues of Maoism erupted between Horowitz and Newton, and the latter concluded the debate on a conciliatory note. Horowitz was delighted: "I had found a political soul mate," he recalls
“Horowitz's intellectual seduction by Newton constitutes some of the most fascinating pages in Radical Son. Newton made Horowitz his confidant, took him to glitzy parties and published his essays in the Panthers' official newspaper. When Newton asked him to raise money for a new Panther school in Oakland, Horowitz eagerly obliged by creating a tax-exempt foundation that eventually netted more than $100,000 for the project.
Attaching himself to the Bay Area Panthers in 1974 was, it turns out, a colossal mistake: Their heyday was over, and the leadership had become increasingly violent and deranged. The educator Herbert Kohl, who was then involved in several Panther education projects, warned Horowitz that Newton was abusing cocaine. ("He had a cold," Horowitz replied.) Uncomfortable being a white man in the upper ranks of the Panther hierarchy, Horowitz attempted to recruit qualified blacks to replace him, so he invited Troy Duster, a sociologist at UC-Berkeley, to meet Newton. But Duster was suspicious of Newton's mercurial behavior and fled. Horowitz then denounced Duster as something of a bourgeois "Uncle Tom." "I must have been insufferable," Horowitz says, reflecting on his younger self.
On July 22, 1974, Huey Newton shot a young prostitute, after which he fled to Cuba. "I should have left [the Panthers] then," Horowitz says. In fact, many of his black friends in the party did depart at that very moment--a turn of events that enraged Newton's successor, a striking, charismatic and voluble young woman named Elaine Brown, who, according to Horowitz, said the party was under attack and "the rats were leaving the ship." Horowitz says he felt trapped. When Brown asked him to recommend someone to oversee the party finances, he suggested Betty Van Patter, a 42-year-old bookkeeper who had worked at Ramparts. Van Patter, who was white, eagerly accepted the position. On December 13, 1974, she vanished. A month later, her body, with a massive head wound, was discovered in San Francisco Bay
It is a case, according to veteran Panther-watcher Kate Coleman, that has "haunted the Bay Area left for two decades." A lengthy investigation by Coleman revealed that Van Patter had discovered questionable activity--rackets, dope, prostitution--at a Panther-run bar in Oakland called the Lamp Post and had reportedly complained about it to Brown, who then fired her.
Van Patter's death plunged Horowitz into "a really clinical depression," he says today. "For a good year, I woke up in tears every day because of Betty." What inspired the guilt was not simply that he'd recommended Van Patter to the Panthers but that he'd been too frightened to warn her about the dangers she faced. But he was in a bind: Van Patter, delighted to be employed by the Panthers, was completely enamored of Brown and wary of Horowitz, whom she did not trust. So he let her proceed with the job.
In the wake of Betty Van Patter's death, Horowitz's life changed.
"Without question, David Horowitz was extremely traumatized by what happened with Betty Van Patter, as I think anyone would be," says Hugh Pearson, author of “The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America.” "As a result, David just totally went berserk with regard to the left-liberal community."
So Horowitz, the “White Guilt Tripper,” flipped sides and became a Right Wing Republican activist.
he has trained his sights on a new target: Afro-America. Hating Whitey's thesis is that contemporary black leaders--ranging from Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton to Jesse Jackson and Julian Bond--have "squandered" the moral legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. by their "restructuring of the civil rights agenda as a radical cause" with policies like affirmative action and multiculturalism. "Whereas the civil rights movement under Martin Luther King's leadership," he writes, "achieved its aims with the support of 90 percent majorities in both houses of Congress, a majority of Americans--roughly 70 percent--oppose the current civil rights agenda that embraces racial preferences." The "moral abdication" of black civil rights leaders can be explained, he insists, by "their close association with a radical left whose anti-white hatred is a by-product of its anti-Americanism." Consequently, "ideological hatred of whites is now an expanding industry not only in the African-American community, but among white 'liberals' in elite educational institutions as well."
As a young man, Horowitz was enamored of socialist revolution and the Black Panthers. His leftism has vanished; but the fervor remains. In that sense, he is not so different from the ex-Communists whom Horowitz's mentor, Isaac Deutscher, dissected in his famous 1950 review of the anthology The God That Failed. The apostate from Communism, Deutscher wrote, "continues to see the world in white and black, but now the colors are differently distributed." The most dignified attitude for the ex-Communist, Deutscher believed, was "critical sense and intellectual detachment." But many apostates found that an impossible road to follow, and, in Deutscher's phrase, ended up doing "the most vicious things."
So….if you want to see who the next generation of Right Wing ideologues is going to be, just look at the ‘white’ people who hook up with this “APSC provided program for the white community to recognize our responsibility for the conditions experienced by colonized and oppressed peoples” Humiliation for other peoples wrongs is no way to build a political movement among EQUALS………..
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20000703/sherman |
|
Re: General Interest Meeting/ Political Study for the Uhuru Movement/APSC |
by Big surprise
(No verified email address) |
16 Jun 2006
|
|
Interesting. I know pretty muchnothing about the aspc, but the idea that a lengthy bio on David Horowitz's involvement with the BPP negates a group today is pretty laughable. |
|
Re: General Interest Meeting/ Political Study for the Uhuru Movement/APSC |
by RobAPSC
robapsc (unverified) |
16 Jun 2006
|
Oh, where to begin?
Flipside, wow! Way to google my name. See the thing is, the only one with big secrets is you. In the Uhuru movement we have something called accountability, to the Party, to the People, to our enemies and to ourselves. I have nothing to hide and so I us my real name, both in Party and Bastille business, instead of using a handle or screen name to cloak my identity. If you look at my comments on the DRM protest thread I mention that I’m in a band, big deal.
Now on to Liam,
Easiest point first, Frantz Fanon’s famous book that you make reference to is called “The Wretched of the Earth”. You spelled “Wretched” wrong, missing the silent “w” that “wretched” and “wrong” have in common. Petty I know, but that seems to be the tone of this site so I’ll go with it. You also used this phrase out of context, which is probably pretty offensive to people not familiar with the book.
As for the body of your post, it’s a shame you couldn’t tell me how you feel instead of lifting a large chunk of a Nation article. No matter, the entire basis of your argument makes little sense to me. You write or paste or whatever, “So…if you want to see who the next generation of Right Wing ideologues is going to be, just look at the ‘white’ people who hook up with this “APSC provided program for the white community to recognize our responsibility for the conditions experienced by colonized and oppressed peoples”. So your argument is that because Horowitz became a right wing nut job, after his stint with the Panthers that my Comrades and I will too? Well, first off let me point out that many APSC members, including our national Chairwomen Penny Hess, have been involved with the struggle for the Liberation of Africa since the founding of the Committee in 1976. They have not become “Right Wing ideologues” yet, I assure you. But let us set that aside for the moment and explore your logic a little further. Ronald Regan was once a star of B movies in Hollywood, as I’m sure you are aware. He than became the President of the USA. Does this mean to find the next generation of dangerous right wing politicians we should look to young Hollywood? Well maybe, bad example. Ok, Che Guevara was a privileged medical student in his youth. He then went onto become the most famous revolutionary and t-shirt the world has ever known. So maybe I should go down to Longwood Ave and see if I can find the next generation of revolutionaries at Beth Israel or Children’s Hospital. Makes sense to you, right Liam?
It is also worth mentioning the fact that Horowitz hooked up with the Black Panther Party after they and the entire African Revolution of the 60’s was defeated militarily by the US government. The pigs could not defeat the Panthers in a war of ideas, so they ended the rebellion the old fashioned way, with terror. By 1974 just about all the Panthers and other African leaders had been murdered, imprisoned or were victims of the chemical warfare that the CIA had unleashed on American cities, that is to say drugs and the drug economy.
New thought. Your first paragraph reads, “The idea that people who happen to have ‘white’ skin are some kind of moral underclass that should be punished for social wrongs committed by people who looked like them in the past is not new. As indicated above, this is called “White Guilt Tripping.” Let’s break this down. You assume that I am merely trying to atone for the past through my organizing. This is belies a typical Eurocentric view of the world. White power/ white imperialism is not something that only happened in the past, it is very much a feature of our modern world. Everyone, all over the world sees this and knows this to be true, except here in the center of the empire. There is a reason Americans spend 50 cents an hour and the vast majority of the world lives on less than $2 a day. Furthermore, you speak of “punishment” for white people. I’m talking about giving the oppressed and colonized people their stolen resources back and shifting the power paradigm in the world and you equate that with a punishment? No! The truth is you will say and do anything to keep the status quo intact. I don’t give a damn if you feel guilty or not. The oppressed people of the world will be free; imperialism is in crisis and will come to an end. The world is becoming more and more polarized everyday. There is no more sitting on the sidelines, it is time for people to choose a side and take a stand. I’m going to be on the side of the principled people who are defeating white power and imperialism, which side are you on Liam?
Rob Notowitz
UHURU MEANS FREEDOM! |
|
Black and White People: Wall St is Your Red Sea! Pharaoh is a Socialist |
by Bemused
(No verified email address) |
17 Jun 2006
|
hint to white adn black people: learn to do something or make something that will allow you to start a business. hire bright young people who live in the community of all ethnic backgrounds. Promote people on the basis of talent. Talent can be making something well, having the personality to convince people to buy your product, can be to do research to improve the product. After you're successful for a few years, sell the business, Contribute money to prove community based programs that educate youth from disadvantaged backgrunds. Offe scholarships.
You, by yourself, will have done more to help those in need than the misnamed racket mentioned above has done in decades. these losers have been pulling this scam for decades. it's amazing each successive generation has a few people "guilty" enough to buy in. Left wing moonies. the loser stokely carmichael and the FBI agent Ron Karenga, the fournder of "kwaanza", a hoover-conceived holiday to destroy blacks, were behind all this.
be successful. control your own efforts to help people. hire bright young people. go into buisness even if you thought it was a boring non-socially useful thing you could do. it is the best thing you can do to help society progress and provide capital to worthy individuals to start up their own ventures.
successful communities like the jews, armenians and lebanese have used business as a way to finance the extensive network of hospitals and educational facilities that african americans desperately need. african americans have been discouraged from going into business and accumalating the savings necessary to begin large scale philanthropy by communists, white liberals and socalled nationalists who were FBI agents.
These so called friends of blacks have successfully caused blacks to have a slave non-entrepreneurial attitude that keeps the community capital starved. |
|
Re: General Interest Meeting/ Political Study for the Uhuru Movement/APSC |
by matthew from Uhuru!
(No verified email address) |
19 Jun 2006
|
Great work Rob. Good to know the Movement's brewing in Boston!
Matthew from Uhuru! |
|
Re: General Interest Meeting/ Political Study for the Uhuru Movement/APSC |
by matthew from uhuru
(No verified email address) |
19 Jun 2006
|
|
Hey Big surprise, check out the APSC website to learn more about the group. www.apscuhuru.org. We also have a slot on www.uhururadio.com which comes out every Sunday from 2-3 pm eastern. (but listen all day!) |
|
![Peace_means_nothing_flier[1].pdf></a> <div class=](http://boston.indymedia.org/images/pdf.gif){kind=small}
Peace means nothing flier[1].pdf (68 k)