Rastafari Speaks

Correcting Misconceptions About the Rastafari Movement

By Ras Tyehimba
May 26, 2013

The article, 7 Misconceptions About Rastas and the Rastafari Movement, by an anonymous writer aimed to clear up misconceptions of the Rastafari movement but instead, perpetuated even more misinformation. While there is some truth to what the author is getting at in terms of the doctrinal diversity of the movement, there were some disturbing aspects. The author acknowledges that "Rastafari is primarily a Black movement that seeks to reconnect Black people with their African roots and promote Black unity". But he/she seems to only state that as a doorway to proclaim: "Humanity is of the same origin; we are all one family. Rastafari seeks to unite all humanity together in love. Rasta is not exclusive."

Certainly humanity in all its diverse manifestations is of the same origin. However, without addressing the history of what transpired after our common origins in Africa, and all the relations of power and privilege, then persons can easily take the reality of our common origins and reach distorted and dangerous conclusions that perpetuate and reinforce structures of domination. Without addressing the history of various relations of domination and subordination it is easy for people to jump from pointing out our common origins to making arguments for Whites Repatriating to Africa or Race Mixing to End Racism.

US & France Intervene in Mali To Protect Land & Resource Grabs

US & France Intervene in Mali To Protect Land & Resource Grabs, Not Because of Al Qeda

By Bruce Dixon
April 29, 2013 - blackagendareport.com

On March 15, former General and AFRICOM commander Carter F. Ham testified before the House Armed Services Committee that the situation in the West African republic of Mali is, along with that in Nigeria and Somalia, “a direct threat to the national security of the United States.” In plain language, claiming a direct threat to US national security is the standard justification for murderous military intervention around the world, and Mali has just been added to the hit list.

Echoing official sources like General Ham, corporate media tell us that Al Qeda and related Islamist forces, flush with weapons from the recent conflict in Libya, are poised to overrun Mali. Should we believe them? Aren't they the same folks who once assured us Saddam, and nowadays Iran, have nuclear weapons? Of course they are, and the real reasons for US intervention are something else entirely.

What North Koreans Think

"We learned the lesson in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan: be strong."

By Stansfield Smith
April 11, 2013 - counterpunch.org

I recently returned from a late March trip to North Korea [Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, DPRK], along with 45 others, through Koryo Tours. On that tour I had the opportunity to discuss with the Korean tour guides their views on the current situation. I only recall the DPRK view mentioned here once in the corporate media, when Dennis Rodman returned with a message from new President Kim Jong. The message was “I don't want war, call me.” Nobel Peace Prize winning President Obama refused to accept it, evidently preferring an escalating threat of a regional nuclear war to talking. I asked my Korean tours guides to be interviewed so I could present their views to US people.

Has the DPRK made proposals for peaceful national reunification?

Yes, now we have options: the historic option of a federal republic, and the recent option. In our history we proposed three principles for reunification: that the North and South unite the country independently of foreign forces, that we reunify peacefully, and that we work together over the years to create the unity of the whole nation.

Africa: Imperialism�s High Mark of Conquest in the 21st Century

The US-NATO military curtain has fallen the length and breadth of Africa. 'Zimbabwe and tiny Eritrea are among the few nations on the African continent that have not yet been absorbed into the AFRICOM matrix.'

By Glen Ford
April 10, 2013 - blackagendareport.com

“Imperialism with a Black face has been fantastically successful, in Africa.”

At present, nothing stands in the way of the militarization and occupation of Africa by the United States and its junior imperialist partners. Every global and multinational organization of any consequence on the continent has been suborned to the service of the neocolonial military project. AFRICOM, the United States Military Command in Africa, has become the headquarters of recolonization, augmented by the militaries of NATO and legitimized by the African Union, itself, and the global credentials of the United Nations.

Chavismo Lives!

By Stephen Lendman
March 06, 2013

Venezuelans mourn. Chavismo lives! Bolivarianism is institutionalized.

Venezuelans expect no less. They want no part of their ugly past. They'll put their bodies on the line to prevent it. They did before. They'll do it again.

Bolivarianism is policy. It's vital to preserve. It's polar opposite neoliberal harshness. America and Venezuela are constitutional worlds apart. More on that below.

On March 5, word came at 4:45PM. Vice President Nicolas Maduro announced it. "We have just received the most tragic and awful information," he said. Hugo Chavez Frias died. "It's a moment of deep pain."

"Those who die for life can't be called dead," he said.

President Hugo Chavez has Died

By Tamara Pearson
March 05, 2013 - Venezuelanalysis.com

After two years of battling cancer, President Hugo Chavez has died today at 4.25 pm.

Vice-president Nicolas Maduro made the announcement on public television shortly after, speaking from the Military Hospital in Caracas, where Chavez was being treated.

Military and Bolivarian police patrols have been sent out into the street to protect the people and maintain the peace. For now, things are calm here, with some people celebrating by honking their car horns, and many others quietly mourning in their homes. Around the country mourners are also gathering in the main plazas to rally, and in some cases, to pray.

Maduro made the announcement just a few hours after addressing the nation for an hour, accusing the opposition of taking advantage of the current situation to cause destabilisation.

American Foreign Policy - Have Our War Lovers Learned Anything?

By William Blum
March 05, 2012 - www.killinghope.org

Over the past four decades, of all the reasons people over a certain age have given for their becoming radicalized against US foreign policy, the Vietnam War has easily been the one most often cited. And I myself am the best example of this that you could find. I sometimes think that if the war lovers who run the United States had known of this in advance they might have had serious second thoughts about starting that great historical folly and war crime.

At other times, however, I have the thought that our dear war lovers have had 40 years to take this lesson to heart, and during this time what did they do? They did Salvador and Nicaragua, and Angola and Grenada. They did Panama and Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan and Iraq. And in 2012 American President Barack Obama saw fit to declare that the Vietnam War was "one of the most extraordinary stories of bravery and integrity in the annals of military history".1

Imperial Jockeying in Africa: U.S. Intervention Sets to Deepen

By Ben Schreiner
February 20, 2013 - workingleft.blogspot.com

As “the peril of guerrilla war looms” for the French in Mali, the United States prepares to step-up its intervention across Africa.

Speaking in Bamako on Tuesday, U.S. Senator Christopher Coons, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, stated that direct U.S. military support of the Malian government is likely to resume after the country’s July elections.

“After there is a full restoration of democracy,” Coons said, “I would think it is likely that we will renew our direct support for the Malian military.”

(The U.S. suspended direct military aid to Mali following a coup last year by a U.S.-trained Malian officer.)

Coons went on to deem al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) a “‘very real threat’ to Africa, the United States and the wider world.”

Mugabe was right

By George Alleyne
February 20, 2013 - newsday.co.tt

Although I hold no brief for Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s leader of many years, nonetheless his policy of Zimbabwe’s reclaiming rich agricultural land which had been arbitrarily seized by British settler farmers when his country was overrun by the United Kingdom was a correct one.

Yet when Mugabe sought to recover the land, following on Zimbabwe’s achieving Independence, after 90 years of colonial rule and cruel exploitation, the Western world insisted that what he was doing was illegal and against good international practice. Apparently, it was in order for the British settlers to have appropriated the land, but another for freed Zimbabwe to retrieve it.

Although the British had sought to legitimise the seizure of the land, as Jeffrey Herbst pointed out in his book, State Politics in Zimbabwe, through the enacting of Land Ordinances which “guaranteed white economic domination and black poverty during the 90-year colonial period” the action was unjust. It was a criminal act, the enormity of which can be gauged by the fact that when Zimbabwe gained its Independence in 1980, 5,000 white settler farmers controlled some 50 percent of the country’s arable land. The other half, as Herbst noted, was occupied by approximately 700,000 indigenous farmers.

Just Like Crack in the 80s, the Police State Thrives on Gun Hysteria

By Glen Ford
February 17, 2013 - blackagendareport.com

“The presence of guns in Black inner cities is sufficient excuse to create a Constitution-free zone.”

From the moment it became known that 20 suburban, mostly white children had been massacred by a young white man in Connecticut, it was inevitable that Black America would pay the price. The nation’s reflexive response to crime and domestic mayhem – real or imagined, and regardless of the actual race of the perpetrators – is always to punish Black people. Whenever the symptoms of the national sickness – America’s endemic violence and alienation – become catastrophically acute, as in Newtown, the standard treatment is mass Black incarceration, by which huge proportions of the Black male population are expelled from the social body like foreign organisms.

The madness in a well-off town in Connecticut had nothing to do with Black inner city violence, which is overwhelmingly rooted in the absence of a legitimate economy, and a lack of social justice – and requires an economic and social justice response. But America is preprogrammed to treat violence as a Black phenomenon.