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POINT
OF THE SPEAR - Editorial by Chairman Omali Yeshitela
Reparations
Now! We're Coming for What's Ours!
The following is the last in
a three-part series. This presentation was made by Chairman Omali Yeshitela
on November 17, 2002 in Philadelphia, PA at the event "Reparations
Now! We’re Coming for What’s Ours!" This event was sponsored
by the Philadelphia branch of the International People’s Democratic
Uhuru Movement (InPDUM).
As you know, America is ratcheting
up the drive for war. The immediate target for this war is Iraq. However,
Iraq is not the real question. Iraq is important to America because of
the oil. In fact, Iraq may have more oil than Saudi Arabia. It may well
be the largest oil reserve that’s known right now.
There’s oil all over Africa
and Latin America. That’s one of the reasons the U.S. is in Colombia
right now — oil. The whole capitalist industrial economy is based
on petroleum, so there’s an interest there based on the oil.
U.S. intends to dominate
the world
To the imperialists, not only is it good for the corporations to have
access to all that oil, but it’s also good for America to dominate
the rest of the world — not only the black world, the brown world
and yellow people, but also Europe, because Europe is dependent on oil
also. Therefore, if all or most of the oil is in the possession of Uncle
Sam, then even Europe is on its knees in dealing with Uncle Sam.
This is why some Europeans
have been reluctant to go along with what Uncle Sam is doing. If Sam controls
the oil, he controls everything. The Bush regime has made no secret of
the fact that it intends to control the whole world.
They have just published what
they call their Strategic Defense Plan. The first thing the Strategic
Defense Plan states is that it will not allow any country in any region
of the world to achieve military parity with the United States government.
Second, it says that the U.S.
shall be the dominant power from now on. It says “if the U.S. sees
any power that is opposed to American interests or the interests of our
allies achieving any kind of weapons of mass destruction, we will do a
pre-emptive strike against them. That’s to say, we will attack them
whether they have done anything to us or not based on our assumptions
of their intent.”
Third, it says not only will
the U.S. do those things, but also if necessary, they’ll do them
without any assistance from any other country on Earth. Therefore, their
intent is to dominate the world. Make no mistake about it, and it’s
naked. The rest of the world knows it. All of Europe knows it.
Up until recently, especially
during the time when the Soviet Union was in existence, there was an appearance
of solidarity between Europe and North America to contend with the Soviet
Union. But, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Uncle Sam has said
it’s going to take it all.
You saw what happened in Rwanda
and what’s happening in Congo and in places like Ivory Coast. You
see the rebellions, the mutinies there – that’s Uncle Sam fighting
against France to take over what used to be French-controlled territories.
The United States government intends to control the world.
The U.S. used to concede territories
to France as a zone of French influence. They aren’t giving up anything
now. They want the whole bit!
Europe is nervous as hell about
this. The last time they saw this, it was Germany. That’s why the
German woman said about Bush, "He’s like Hitler."
Imperialism in crisis
But I want to tell you something. All the bluster and all the weapons
— and they’ve got a bunch of weapons; there’s never been
in history anything comparable in terms to the military power that you
see in the United States — represent a crisis. It’s a power
that’s fighting for its very life.
I say this because in the past
when you saw imperialism in motion, it was a dynamic motion, of just taking
over everything, collecting all the resources and growing stronger and
bigger as a consequence.
Now what you see with imperialism
in motion is an attempt to defend and hold everything it stole in the
past. There’s nothing dynamic about it. It’s an attempt to stop
the revolutionary process that’s happening all over the world. Sometimes
it doesn’t look exactly like revolutions, but people are taking back
and fighting for their own resources. They’re removing their resources
from the absolute control of the imperialists and that undermines the
whole social system itself. It is fighting for its very life.
This crisis has been deepening
for a very long time, certainly since the second imperialist war that
they like to refer to as the Second World War or World War II. World War
II was white power fighting to re-divide the world. Did you know that
there were no good guys in World War II? You don’t know that because
you hear on the news that World War II was the last honest war made by
America. There was nothing honest there. It was a war to re-divide the
world.
In the first imperialist war,
Germany had lost a lot of its colonies and other resources to the rest
of Europe. In fact, Rwanda was then a German colony, and when Germany
lost the war, the white people gave the black people in Rwanda to Belgium,
to punish Germany. Hitler was fighting to take back for Germany what all
the other white people had all over Europe, and he was not only going
to take that, but the white people too.
World War II was a war to re-divide
the world and there was nothing good or decent about it. Don’t tell
me that it was wonderful because they rescued the Jews. It had nothing
to do with that. How can somebody be good for rescuing some white people
in Germany when they’re murdering black people all over the planet,
which is what they were doing? They were murdering us in Philadelphia
and down South when that was going on.
This war created space for
peoples all around the world to push for revolution. Immediately following
that war, India became free and independent in 1947 and China in 1949.
In the ‘50s Cuba was liberated and there were activities in Kenya
with the Mau Mau; Nkrumah was active in Ghana. There was revolutionary
work happening everywhere.
Going into the ‘60s there
was Viet Nam and people like the Tupamaros in Uruguay; the Sandinistas
were trying to make revolution in Nicaragua. All over places like South
Africa, there were revolutionaries under the influence of Kwame Nkrumah.
All over, African people were trying to do things. Che Guevara had Latin
America in flames during that period, and he even went to Africa to try
to make that revolutionary process happen.
Since that time, you’ve
seen this incredible revolutionary process. In 1979, James Earl Carter
made that famous speech at the banquet in Iran. He told the Shah of Iran
how much he appreciated him, because, he said, "You’re an island
of stability." Then he got on the plane to go back to Washington,
and the Shah almost beat him there because the people overthrew the government.
They’ve been trying to
put a cap on the revolutionary process. That’s what gave rise to
Ronald Wilson Reagan. Carter was a thug. Don’t make any mistake about
that. Brzezinski, who was the National Security Advisor for Carter, is
the one who created the modern jihad. Osama bin Laden and the so-called
Islamic fundamentalist movement were created by the Carter regime. It
was created to destroy the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. They sucked the
Soviets into Afghanistan, and they brought Muslims from all over the world
and destroyed the Soviet Union there. Carter did that. Brzezinski was
on the Afghan border bragging about it on TV.
Then, Ronald Reagan came in
with a mandate from the American people to stop revolutionary activities
all over the world, to get black people off welfare, and to do the whole
bit. They’ve been trying to put the genie back in the bottle. They’ve
been trying to stop the revolutionary process.
Now you have Bush Jr. in power,
and you see all the clothes taken off the Emperor. It is naked, wide open.
With the failure of neo-colonialism, the United States government is trying
to put direct white power back in control of the whole world again. They
can’t trust the Shah. They can’t trust Saddam Hussein, who used
to be almost in the employ of the United States government. If we’re
not careful, we’ll be back on the plantations again at the rate this
thing is attempting to move now.
You really have to understand.
This is not about Iraq. It is about a social system, which was founded
on the theft of the human and material resources of the rest of the people
of the world, attempting to rescue itself from a terrible crisis that’s
been bleeding it for a very long time now.
That’s why we talk about
reparations. We are a part of those stolen resources that gave rise to
the creation of imperialism and white power. I know we like to say we’re
against injustices and we are, but we need to learn how to be for our
selfish selves as well. In order to be for your selfish self, you need
to know what the real contradictions are that we’re confronted with.
Reparations due for more
than slavery
Some people handle the question of reparations as dealing simply with
the issue of slavery. I disagree, and I think that was one of the major
contributions that the Party brought to the whole discussion of reparations.
I wrote a book in 1982 called Stolen Black Labor, which, for the first
time, using a relatively scientific approach, quantified the value of
stolen labor of African people. We came up with a total of $4.1 trillion.
It was a relatively scientific process. If I did it again it would be
done differently, and it would be many, many, many times more than that
amount, but it was the first attempt at quantification. It actually put
a figure on it, saying that there were "X" numbers of Africans
brought into slavery who produced "X" amount of cotton and tobacco,
etc.
The thing that was very interesting
about this investigation was the realization that the rate of exploitation
of Africans has been greater since the end of slavery. Just think about
it. They were working us for free, from "can’t see" to
"can’t see," and they made a whole bunch of money off that.
I’m saying the rate of exploitation has been greater since slavery
ended.
That includes convict leasing.
During slavery, prisons were white. The actual end of slavery was approximately
April 1865. In December 1865, the United States government passed the
13th Amendment. So, they freed you in April, but in December they passed
the 13th Amendment, which said neither slavery nor involuntary servitude
is permissible except as punishment for a crime.
Then they wrote all the laws
directed at Africans, designer laws just as they have now. So they didn’t
end slavery, they changed the terms for slavery. It was no accident.
For 50 years after that, they
didn’t build many prisons. They had what they called convict leasing.
They made laws, particularly throughout the South, because Africans weren’t
working for white people any more. Not only wouldn’t Africans work
for white people, we started wandering. If they passed a place and saw
some chickens and vegetables, we would take them, because we grew them.
We saw the product of our labor and would take it.
Now black people wouldn’t
work. All the white people wanted black people back on the job again.
Not only did they want us on the job, they wanted us to work on terms
that were unfavorable to us. We couldn’t leave if we wanted to quit.
That was true of the North and the South.
So there was this incredible
upheaval. They began to pass laws that said if you didn’t have what
they called a "visible means of support," they could lock you
up. That’s what the vagrancy law was. They passed the so-called pig
law. It said that if anybody stole a pig they could be sentenced to 10
years. They’d lock you up, then they would pay the white man (sometimes
the same white man who you were working for on the plantation for free)
so much per African.
This white man would then put
us back to work on the plantation. We rebuilt the modern economy of the
South by African convict leasing. We built railroads, cleared swamps and
went into the mines in Alabama, Birmingham and places like that. That’s
what we did. They say you all won’t work, but hell, we’re tired.
Convict leasing was characterized
as worse than slavery. When we were "slaves," when white people
owned us, they had an investment that they would try to protect. Now the
State was the owner of African people, and the white people who we worked
for didn’t care if we lived or died. It was no skin off their backs.
They had a saying, "One dies, get another." Literally!
There were instances where
they would not even feed us. They would get hundreds of us, take us into
the swamps in Louisiana, for example, and work us in the swamps with snakes
and the rest of it. They didn’t give us any food.
You think I’m making that
up. You don’t have to make up things on white folks. Just look at
the damn history. They don’t teach any of us this history that I’m
talking about right now. Sometimes they talk about George Washington Carver
and peanut butter. Then they leave out the fact that Jiffy owns it all,
and at best, we get a job with them.
So, the rate of exploitation
has become greater since then. It’s not just about slavery. We have
to explain the phenomenon of what’s happening to us right now. If
you talk about reparations, it’s really important to make a claim
that our current condition of existence owes itself to our relationship
to American imperialism.
This is the point that I want
to make though: Slavery isn’t something that happened to black people
in America as such. Slavery is something that happened to Africa. It took
an attack on Africa to get us here.
It was an attack on Africa
that even today sees Africa under-populated. They like to say that Africa’s
poor because there are too many of us. They say the birth rate is too
high. Congo alone has the same area in terms of territory as India. There
are a billion people in India and only 50 million people in Congo.
It has nothing to do with birth
rate. It has to do with exploitation rate. It has to do with the fact
that Africa is under-populated because Africans are not there. Africa
is under-developed, for lack of a better term, because Africans have been
developing for white power everywhere else except in Africa.
I think it’s fundamentally
important for us to understand that. I don’t think it’s possible
to have freedom as an African person that’s separate from Africa
itself. I believe that all Africans everywhere need to recognize the connection
to Mother Africa that gave birth to us.
There are monuments left in
Egypt that are estimated to be 15,000 years old. That’s a long time!
You have huge monuments — things like the pyramids, which are five,
six, seven thousand years old.
Now if somebody makes something
to last five or six thousand years, they didn’t make it for themselves,
did they? They made it for us who were coming behind them. They made it
for all of us. Yet, everything that has come out of Africa is in the control
of somebody else.
It is our responsibility as Africans to take back what belongs to Africa,
so that Africa and her children all over the world will be able to know
freedom and prosperity!
Uhuru!
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