Many genocides have to happen. That is not my concern, even though I do not think I like it. This is something we just cannot do anything about right now. Now is no time for this mess. We must protect our democracy of hypocrisy first. Our colonies we are genociding in multiple places at once can wait. Black people who are being mass murdered can wait. Black people being legally lynched and executed can wait. Black people dying at the hands of the great yankee plantation can wait. Filipino people under the yoke of neocolonialism and colonialism, which is continuing to kill people and suppress its peoples’ war, can wait. Palestine can wait. Lebanon can wait. Yemen can wait. Syria can wait. The Palestinian people being forced into multiple consecutive death marches around Gaza, who are being bombed on every side of these death marches, can wait, and the Lebanese people now facing their own genocide in the suburbs of Beirut and outward can join in on having to wait — for we are more important than them. We are defending ourselves, “our rights,” and must gain at the expense of the wholesale slaughter of the families of the colonized.
Here is the ideological degradation of the yankee political movement. Here is our diagnosis. It has been desolated. It has been converted into a lackey of an imperialist colonialist government. It cannot even accept what is happening to itself.
We are now in the “post-politics” era of bourgeois propaganda. Now our politics is relegated to this ridiculous demand of democracy. If there are many genocides, a cop city for each municipal government in fascist amerikkka, another operation wetback, continued rabid islamophobia, continued rabid anti-immigrant and anti-refugee terror, continued genocide in Sudan, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Congo, continued constant executions of Black people which go to the protest of only a small awake portion of the masses of the yankee empire, continued terroristic bombing of Syria, continued terroristic yankee occupation of Somalia — all this is fine. It is very well. We must protect our democracy. Our democracy first.
Khaliifah Williams has been martyred.
Who wants to study politics, wants to work on politics, wants to practice politics? We cannot just sit and click a vote button or sign a letter and receive our portion of imperial privileges stolen from a poor country whose genocide we only protest tomorrow.
To Cesaire, colonialism is thingification — the bringing down of a person into dehumanized subhuman status. Now, we see furthermore the thingification of revolutionary consciousness. The social being of this nightmarish empire, of this settler project, has been split into dehumanized parts that are easily manipulable — the social consciousness hereof is bourgeois-ified to the extent that it is so degraded, so pacified, so depoliticized that it can now be, with a few words, with a few slogans, manipulated into turning off consciousness altogether, and into reaction.
The social consciousness derived from the majority’s social position in settler society has by default inclined them into such slavishness, into such political apathy, inaction, that they accept whatever the bourgeois fascist government says, and whatever its political parties and spiritual instruments of oppression say, by underwhelmingly deceptive slogans. That economic position — one that, not unlike the israelis, siphons material benefits from settler-colonial occupation and looting of the Global South — pollutes the worldview of those inside the U.S.-Canadian empire, hoping to ensnare us in a belief that the imperialist vampire is our friend. There is not even a need for a programme anymore in the yankee empire, only repetitions of: Democracy! Protect your rights! Lesser of two evils! Vote against Trump! It is just these simple, blank slogans – and by invoking them you have all of the workers paid off by the spoils of empire behind you, all of the social democrats and “vanguard communists” behind you, and it is now scandalous for anyone outside of this crowd to point this indisputably weak and illogical capitulation out to the world.
Khaliifah Williams has been martyred.
Regarding the Black nation, this special colonial question, everyone who is still somehow awake still charges genocide. The chauvinists by contrast have disputed this, and demand only a paper “unity” between the white laborer and the Black laborer that completely ignores the super exploitation of the latter for the sake of the former.
Regarding immigrant people, so often fleeing the devastation of U.S. foreign policy, we charge genocide. The government is continuing its policies of concentration camps and systematic destruction of immigrant languages, culture, communities. Deportation is an instrument of the most chauvinistic and fascistic oppression. The chauvinists meantime are demanding merely a paper “immigrant non-immigrant unity.” To “protect democracy” means to close the border in the collective yankee mind. Chauvinism assuredly has always been embedded in the minds of the imperial “left,” as they are and always have been settlers here — and now it is flaring still more. Fascism was already here; the fascist positions before now were superficially rejected, now the fascist positions are widely, universally accepted, and our rotten, all pervasive chauvinism today is only deniable because, by its very omnipresence, it is now unquestionable. Deportation is rising; we vote for a cop. People die; we vote for the killers.
Unity only for unity’s sake: unity around “democracy” that does not exist. They speak of “democracy.” I speak of over a hundred thousand dead in Gaza, of wholesale slaughter of peoples, of Black peoples who are still being genocided, who are still suffering in the prison colonies, who are still being enslaved in the prison colonies. I am speaking of many genocides and immigrant people fleeing countries “our own” government has overthrown who are now being oppressed and deported again by this same government of ours.
I am speaking of the fact that in the epoch of imperialism and colonialism, the national and colonial questions are embedded with all other problems. They speak of the need to “protect democracy.” I speak of the need to destroy a “democracy” which is itself the agent of colonialist and imperialist terrorism and wholesale slaughter of nationalities.
We need to destroy the “democracy” of Death Rows lined up state to state with Black people who are shipped to the objection of absolutely zero tangible social-political force to the legalized gallows. We need to destroy the “democracy” that smothers Syria, Iran, Palestine, Yemen, Lebanon. We need to destroy the “democracy” that for more than 200 years has relegated Black people to second-class citizenship. This “democracy” is rotten and parasitic. It demands we focus all our political energies on it until it consumes our capacity for political life. They are in anguish for this “democracy” of theirs. Insofar as it is a democracy of ongoing Nakba, of lynchings, of mass oppression of Black and Indigenous people, of occupations and coups, we aim to destroy it.
This demand for “democracy” is chauvinism. It is a demand for the improvement of a settler order that is committing many genocides, that is itself genocide against Turtle Island, and nothing more. This is the belly of the beast but it is not being accepted as such. As long as chauvinism continues to control our movement for the abolishing of present-day society, it is no such thing, and we have no urgency — we are not meeting the maturing crisis, and we are instead fleeing from it. We say we want to work “for democracy in November” because we want to regress into “business as usual” and accept the epoch of many genocides as normal. We have forsaken our Marxism and our anti-zionism for colonialist, ruling-class endorsed privileges. We are giving up on the oppressed for ourselves to be “ascended” still closer to being a bourgeoisie.
Without a single doubt there is a election coming upon the horizon which shall be the genocide ticket, in which the two parties of the bourgeoisie will indulge in theatrics and meaningless trifles, but fundamentally be enthusiastically propagandising and materially supporting the multiple genocides they are carrying out. Joe Biden, the so-called “most progressive” president of the empire is apathetic about the horrors he is supporting and we are left to debate “social gains” outside of a genocide we may or may not get as a result of this election cycle. He is actively, consistently supporting the genocidal entities which depend on his government. He is actively, consistently ignoring the demands of every oppressed movement. Joe Biden and his Democratic Party are in no way progressive – they’re the most progressively apologetic for reaction.
But there are no social gains independent of genocides, in the era of many genocides. The epoch of imperialism is the epoch of decaying, moribund capitalism – it is absolutely a fetter upon continued social development. It is abating any forces of progress. It is a hindrance – not a tool with which to reach a preferred end. There can only be progression with its destruction. And when imperialism reaches rabid stages of genocides, multiple genocides, it is calling for its own gravedigger.
Khaliifah Williams has been martyred.
The material force of oppression in bourgeois society is also its spiritual force of oppression. In the epoch of many genocides it has never been a greater spiritual force of oppression than now.
The colonialist bourgeoisie has successfully reduced politics down to papers and ballots. Chauvinism is abundant and the many genocides are now to the chauvinists less important than their little medal of democracy. Politics in the empire is materially for genocide insofar as it is rhetorically for democracy.
We need a truly internationalist proletarian party. It is time to consolidate communist organizations of the oppressed, of the lumpenproletariat, of the super exploited and colonized masses, of Indigenous people — which will be the first really communist party, which will first and foremost, and primarily and always (until the epoch is truly over, until we have smashed it with our hands), struggle against the many genocides, always in relation to the genocides.
This is for all land back. This is for the death of the zionist entity. This is for freeing the Land and New Afrika. This is for Hawaiian independence and all the rest of the colonies of the yankee empire. This is for the end of the yankee empire and for Palestine to be free from the river to the sea. This is for a globalized intifada. This is for Nasrallah, Khaliifah Williams, Ismail Haniyeh, and all of our martyrs.
All of this constitutes what is actually important, what is practically the most important. This title does not allot itself to the “democracy” of hypocrisy.
And all politics which does not see this, which does not accept this, which does not struggle around all of this all of the time, is a politics which is as good as dead, just as “democracy” in the yankee empire is as good as dead. There is no room for saying otherwise. There must be the reconsolidation of the movement along the lines of the most awakened and oppressed peoples imprisoned herein because in them lies our only hope. The movement must learn to disrupt business as usual, to disrupt settler, imperialist, chauvinist politics as usual, to disrupt “democracy” as usual. In this fascist empire we have to knock down bourgeois democracy, not protect it. Every protection of it is 100 more state executions, 100 more million dollars to the zionist entity, 100 more immigrant families deported. There are no more excuses for passivity.
We must stop wasting time and start committing to gaining in this task now. We must make daily gains in this task starting now. And if we do not do this, we are going for barbarism.
We are on the path to barbarism now. We have a duty to get off this path.
We cannot waste any more time.
Khaliifah Williams has been martyred.
There will be more.
We cannot let there be more.
