There Is No In-between: Stand with the People or with the Oppressors

Published in Issue 477 of The Black Commentator on June 21, 2012
By Larry Pinkney

“Every artist, every scientist, must decide now where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of the greatest of man’s literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of racial and national superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. The struggle invades the formerly cloistered halls of our universities and other seats of learning.”
-Paul Robeson

“The masses are in reality their own leaders, dialectically creating their own development process.”
-Rosa Luxemburg

The women and men of this nation and throughout Mother Earth are engaged, like it or not, in a life and death struggle against a relatively tiny but powerful elite whose objective is to keep us perpetually in economic and political servitude. In this struggle, there can be “no impartial observers” for the “battlefront” truly is “everywhere.”

Every conceivable ploy is utilized by this powerful elite to ensure that everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people are kept in a paralyzed and powerless state. This is not merely about corporate bloodsucking and hegemony – it is also about the maintenance of deliberate mental enslavement of everyday people; there is no trick, no con, and no tactic that is too dastardly to be used by this elite against ordinary people.

The incessant propaganda machinery of this national and international elite is to be found not only in the U.S. corporate-stream media’s lies, distractions, and omissions, but also in literature and the so-called institutions of “learning” throughout this nation and around the world. The grooming, ascension, and installment of Barack Obama as the head of the U.S. Empire was a stroke of well-planned fiendish genius by this avaricious elite; and more such treachery, of varying kinds, can and should be expected.

Everyday ordinary people are not the masters of this alleged U.S. “democracy.” In fact, it should now be obvious to conscious and thinking people that this is no democracy at all. It is a de facto 21st century police-state-backed-corporate plutocracy that will not hesitate to brutalize, maim, frame, and murder ordinary people in this nation and around the planet – all in the fallacious name of “democratizing” them/us.

Ordinary people are faced with an urgent choice. We will either support our oppressors and in so doing, our own political and economic oppression, or we will creatively find the ways and means to band together collectively to struggle against and throw off our chains. Rosa Luxemburg correctly observed, “That those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” This is more relevant today than ever before. Our choice must be to recognize and break free of our systemic “chains.” We must not be delusional, thinking that we can somehow be “impartial observers.” We cannot. There is no middle ground in this, humanity’s struggle. We are either on the side of the oppressors (irrespective to their color or gender), or we are on the side of the vast majority of humanity both here and abroad.

We must resist and struggle against the tyranny and terrorism of this corporate plutocracy. We see this corporate plutocracy’s tyranny and terrorism against everyday people manifested in the endless U.S. corporate-backed wars and military interventions in other lands. We see this tyranny and terrorism manifested in the homelessness, home foreclosures, unemployment & under-employment, mass incarceration, and the obliteration of civil liberties in this nation. To reiterate: We must resist and struggle against the tyranny and terrorism of this corporate plutocracy.

Dispense with the “lesser-of-the evils” notion! Dispense with the enslaving notion of Democratic and Republican parties – they are one systemic party – a party of rats, opportunists, and betrayers, waging fake skirmishes with each other to keep the everyday people confused, divided, and bamboozled, enslaved on the Democratic / Republican Party plantations of subterfuge and illusion.

Remember: There is no in-between. Either Stand with the People or with the Oppressors. But know this: The yearning and sacrifices of everyday people in this long and protracted struggle will not forever be denied, and in the final analysis, they will assuredly triumph.

Choose your humanity! Choose to stand with everyday ordinary people in this nation and throughout Mother Earth. Choose a new and different model of human interactions, collectively created by all of us to serve the majority of humankind – minus the bloodsuckers and tricksters.

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. 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), 107Cowgate (Ireland and Scotland), and Mayihlome News (Azania/South Africa). 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.)