Published in Intrepid Report on November 6, 2012
By Larry Pinkney
“What most of us must be involved in—whether we teach or write, make films, write films, direct films, play music, act, whatever we do—has to not only make people feel good and inspired and at one with people around them, but also has to educate a new generation to this very modest thing: change the world.”—Howard Zinn
“Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.”—Frantz Fanon
Either we are going to get on the euphemistic plantation/reservation boxcars on their way to hell or we are going to derail the entire damn train, and fundamentally change this hypocritical, filthy, unjust and corrupt U.S. political system. We can’t have it both ways simultaneously.
This U.S. political system will not change of its own accord. It is WE who must change it!
The systemic symbiotically-joined, corporate-owned Democrat and Republican parties have placed this nation, and the world, on the brink of environmental and nuclear annihilation. There comes a time when, we the everyday ordinary Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people, must take collective responsibility for this sad and insane state of affairs. There comes a time when we must act together in and for our common interests, and stop allowing ourselves to be manipulated by the propaganda arm of the Democrat and Republican parties, i.e. by the corporate-stream media.
We are either going to continue collaborating, to our own detriment and demise, with this corporate controlled U.S. Empire—or we are going to, once and for all, take our destinies into our own collective hands. We cannot eat the rotten cake of this corrupt political system while simultaneously honestly struggling for economic justice and human rights, at home and abroad. We must stop allowing this system to pimp us and and make hypocrites of us.
We must stop fooling ourselves in this nation. The infamous, repressive, bloody, and unscrupulous U.S. government COINTELPRO activities against U.S. citizens have now morphed into the even more horrifying extrajudicial indefinite imprisonment provision of the so-called National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012. The two party dictatorship of the corporate-owned Democrat and Republican parties, combined with the ‘Electoral College’ system and so-called ‘corporate personhood,’ have made ‘democracy’ in the United States an utter sham. The horrors of COINTELPRO have been legally codified in the NDAA, which is now the law of the land. But so many people remain fast asleep. [Reference That was Then, This is Now: Cointelpro Today with Larry Pinkney] ‘Elections’ in this nation, particularly on the federal level, are an unmitigated farce of gigantic proportions. Think about it as if your life depends on it—for indeed it does!
My brothers and sisters, we in this nation, are in very serious trouble. We can ill afford to collaborate with this two party corporate dictatorship of and by the Democrats and Republicans of the U.S. Empire. We must cease allowing ourselves to be the canon fodder of and for the Empire. We must cease allowing ourselves to be manipulated and pitted against the ordinary peoples of Africa, Asia, Europe, and the ‘Middle East,’ etc. We must take our collective destinies into our own hands, in our own common interest and that of humanity as a whole.
It is time to consciously engage in this long and protracted struggle for real systemic change. Everyday people throughout Mother Earth are one family with many variations. If we “do not act,” we do not, in the words of Rosa Luxemburg, “recognize our chains.” If we do not act, we fail to understand and actualize our own enormous collective human power. If we do not act, we fail to heed the words of Frederick Douglass, when he said, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” Humanity’s struggle continues and intensifies.
We must stop allowing the bloodsucking national and global corporate/military elite to keep us divided, manipulated, and in economic and social servitude and mired in perpetual wars. We must regain our humanity, and stop collaborating with Empire! Let us be mindful of the late historian Howard Zinn’s words: “There has always been, and there is now, a profound conflict of interest between the people and the government of the United States.”
The choice really is ours. Think about it!
Remember: Each one, reach one. Each one, teach one. Onward, then, my sisters and brothers. Onward!
Larry Pinkney is a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the former Minister of Interior of the Republic of New Africa, a former political prisoner and the only American to have successfully self-authored his civil/political rights case to the United Nations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In connection with his political organizing activities, Pinkney was interviewed in 1988 on the nationally televised PBS News Hour, formerly known as The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, and more recently on the nationally syndicated Alex Jones Show. Pinkney is a former university instructor of political science and international relations, and his writings have been published in various places, including The Boston Globe, San Francisco BayView newspaper, Black Commentator, Intrepid Report, Global Research (Canada), LINKE ZEITUNG (Germany), 107 Cowgate (Ireland and Scotland), and Mayihlome News (Azania/South Africa). He is in the archives of Dr. Huey P. Newton (Stanford University, CA), cofounder of the Black Panther Party. For more about Larry Pinkney see the book, Saying No to Power: Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker, by William Mandel [Introduction by Howard Zinn]. (Click here to read excerpts from the book.)
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