The Decolonizer, October 2016

THEDECO LO NIZER October 2016

The End Of American Empire Is Near The Decolonizer Does The Police

Next Year This Time

The Hairless Apes New Clothes

TABLEO FCO NTENTS 1

What is THE DECOLONIZER?

2

The Decolonizer Does The Police

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The News Feed

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The End of American Empire is Near

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The Decolonizer Does The police (Continued)

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Next Year This Time

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How To's

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Decolonizing Culture

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This is A Big Fuck You to Students: The Uncensored Version of the # FeesMustFall Movement

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The Hairless Apes New Clothes

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Brief Histories

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Decolonizing Voices

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The Pathetic Hilary Clinton Bandwagon

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Black Depression and Healing

Who Will Survive America Track The Movement

W hat IsTHEDECO LO NIZER? THE DECOLONIZER

is fire

you lit the match

you fanned the flames

when we said we were starving

you only fed us gasoline

we said we can not breathe

you smothered us in coal

tried to beat us to death

with a club of firewood

pelted us with gun powder

Napalmed our arms and legs

The fire.

it only grows.

soon

you smell the smoke

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TheDecolonizer DoesThePolice

By The Decolonizer

All cops are shit. All cops. Each and every one of them. All of the cops. Every single cop. The cops; all of them. Every person that is a cop. Even the Black ones (especially the Black ones). Even the Brown ones (especially the Brown ones). Even the ones that help people.

Even the ones that save lives.

Al l cops are shit .

Across the interwebs there was a story shared recently about a cop who drove a Black man from Ohio to Detroit to be reunited with his family. The headline in bold letters: Cop Drives Man 100 Miles to be With His Family.

So the story goes: Black man looses his young sister in a tragic car accident.

Black man and friend jump into a car and drive to Detroit. Black man and fiend get pulled over at a traffic stop by police officer. Friend goes to jail. Cop offers to drive Black man to Detroit. Cue bro bonding sequence. Black man appears on TV. They pull the string in his back. And he says: "not all cops are bad."

There has been a clamoring for stories just like this one. Harrowing, tear-jerker stories of cops who save little kittens from trees. Stories that encourage us to think of police on a case by case basis.

These stories imply that, while there maybe "bad apples" on the force, the police in general are a necessary good, and above all good people. That there is a human being behind the badge and uniform.

Somehow that human being is never tainted by being involved in the violence of empire.

The Hist ory of t he Pigs

The origins of policing in the West first developed in France in 1667. King Louis XIV had developed a royal edict that oversaw a force of 44 commissaires de police who were to be stationed in the districts of Paris.

They were formed primarily to maintain the aristocratic ruling class structure in France.

These "pigglets" protected private property, and contained the poor working class in their growing discontentment with the French crown. The word police is derived from the French "agent de police."

The whole of Europe would follow the French example more than a century later and form similar policing organizations, many of which were privately funded.

In their respective colonies, the European colonizers would follow these same developments happening in Europe. Night Watch and paramilitary policing groups were established in the West Indies, Canada, Latin America, and the United States. Later, more structured policing operations would appear in colonies in Africa, Asia, and Australia.

In the colonies these units served a very particular function. In order to safeguard the forced occupation of indigenous lands and protect the white settlers on these lands, these organizations would terrorize and kill indigenous populations.

Settlers would volunteer to keep watch of the colony over night to protect the colony from indigenous resistance. Military soldiers and generals were often recruited from the colonizing country to assist in the project. In the desperate attempt to make stolen land settler property, private and community watch groups as well as settler militias and regular soldiers were used to solidify the violent occupation. Their sole purpose was to ensure the safety of the invading settlers and secure settler property.

The institution of chattel slavery in some colonies also made early policing forms a necessity, especially with the threat of slave revolts.

The first slave patrols in the United States were formed in the Carolinas as early as 1704. If Black people were considered property by slave holders, the slave patrols functioned exclusively for the securing of that property.

Slave patrols were responsible for tracking and catching runaway slaves as well as suppressing slave uprisings. The patrols enforced the state slave codes, slave curfews, and in cooperation with militiamen, broke-up any unauthorized gathering of slaves. After the Civil War, many of these "patrollers" became professional police officers who enforced Jim Crow laws. At night they would pull sheets over their heads and burn crosses.

There was never a difference between police and the Ku Klux Klan.

Despite these developments the early policing systems in the colonies and in Europe were largely unorganized. Many depended on volunteers who would often show up to their posts drunk or were just not dependable.

As the Industrial Revolution threatened to increased class conflicts in Europe, a more centralized policing system was being developed in London, England to maintain ruling class interests. The Metropolitan Police Act was passed in 1829 and the very first centralized bureaucratic police department was established in London: The Metropolitan Police Service. By the 1830s, policing had move from irregular patrols and community watch groups to become a centralized institution controlled by the state and paid for with tax-payer money.

As before, the new policing system spread to the European colonies, this time establishing themselves in newly colonized territories. The colonial paramilitary groups on the continent of Africa terrorized as well as enforced taxation and labor onto the people. These groups quickly transformed into professional colonial policing agencies supported by the colonial administration.

Continued on page 10

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TheNewsfeed NoDakotaAccessPipeline Water defenders at Standing Rock in North Dakota continue to fight against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in the face of mounting oppression by state and federal riot police. Since April protesters have set up camp at the site in order to halt the 3.7 billion dollar project that would contaminate the Missouri River, destroy sacred Native burial grounds, and violate tribal sovereignty.

The colonial policing units have escalated their violent tactics over the last few weeks in an attempt to round-up and jail as many protesters as possible. Police raids at camps have resulted in the arrests of over 200 people within the past few weeks. Water defenders have set fire to construction equipment and organized road blockades. Some water defenders on horse back herded a large gathering of buffalo that suddenly appeared at the site. On October 28th a confrontation between protesters and riot police resulted in the violent arrests of 141 people. An Unidentified armed white man entered the camp grounds and confronted protesters. This man is said to be a private mercenary hired by Dakota Access.

Obama still ignores calls to halt the Dakota Access pipeline and Hillary Clinton when asked to give comment said "all voices should be heard" and that police should be allowed to do their jobs safely.

HurricaneinHaiti Hurricane Mathew tore through Haiti early this October causing a catastrophe for a people who already endured a devastating earthquake in 2010. At least 900 people died at the hands of the storm. Thousands of homes were destroyed. The hardest hit areas were in the southern half of the country where the storm destroyed crops and caused a food and clean water shortage. Local clinics were left with little supplies and were unable to satisfy the demand for medical attention. Water contamination threatens to cause a cholera outbreak. It is estimated that 1.4 million people need urgent humanitarian assistance.

In the town of Les Cayes hundreds of Haitians protested at a United Nations base criticizing the delayed response of the U.N. U.N. peacekeepers proceeded to spray the crowd with tear gas. The U.N promised to raise $120 million (U.S.) in relief aid for Haiti But has only raised 13% of that goal. U.N relief during the 2010 earthquake was a disaster and leaves many Haitians skeptical of U.N. promises.

Venezuela and Cuba have been most helpful so far. Upon news of Haiti, Venezuela immediately sent three loads of food, water, medicine, and blankets. Venezuelan Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez presented a proposal for an international plan of solidarity with Haiti. Both Cuban and Venezuelan doctors have been active in Haiti.

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Flint W ater Crisis The people of Flint, Michigan now face a bacterial outbreak because they are unable to wash their hands in the contaminated city water.

The bacterial infection shigellosis has spread widely in Flint and is commonly known to be transmitted by people when they don't adequately. Symptoms of shigellosis have included nausea, vomiting, fever, and severe diarrhea. At least 454 cases have emerged in the State of Michigan this year. After a government scandal and public health crisis that occurred when city water was switched to the Flint river, lead levels in the water have poisoned residents and caused an outbreak of legionnaires disease. People have experienced hair loss, brain damage, and skin ailments due to the contaminated water. Though the water has been switched back to the original source, residents have now been avoiding the water all together, some even using baby wipes to wash their hands. Flint water remains unsafe to use even as the water has been switched back. Governor Rick Snyder still has yet to be criminally charged for his part in the crisis.

PeaceDeal InColombiaW ont G o The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) negotiated a peace accord with the Colombian government that was voted down by the Colombian people early this October. The deal was going to put an end to a 52 year armed civil war in Colombia that already claimed the lives of more than 250,000 people. By a very narrow margin of votes, about half a percentage point, the peace accord was rejected.

Voter turnout was low with under 40% of the people showing up at the polls. In an official statement FARC said in spite of the decision FARC will still pursue peace. Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos said that he will not give up on peace and will send negotiators back to Cuba to continue peace efforts. The bilateral cease-fire is still in effect despite the "no" decision.

TheU.S.BombsYemen On October 13th the United States in an effort to attack Houthi rebels waging a civil war against the Saudi and U.S. backed dictator president Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, waged an air strike in Yemen. U.S. forces clamed that Houthis attacked a U.S. navel vessel in the area although Houthis have denied the attacks.The United States military has been supporting Saudi air strikes against the Houthi rebels for months and have backed the Hadi government in the most deplorable human rights violations in Yemen. This October was the very first time the U.S. has directly attacked Houthi rebels, an action which may trigger direct U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen.

G O PHandsO ff Me In response to Donald Trumps dismissal of sexual assault allegations, women in over 15 cities gathered outside local Trump campaign offices on October 18th to demand the GOP to withdrawal their endorsement of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee. The campaign # GOPHandsOffMe aims to continue to keep Trumps sexual assault record in the spotlight as the election winds down to a close. The campaign has already received support from BLM founder Alicia Garza and civil rights attorney Naila Awan.

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theEndO f AmericanEmpireIsNear

By Christopher Garrick

It's time for the end of America as an empire and an idea. the nation founded by colonization and the genocide of native peoples and enslavement of African people needs to finally come to an end.

At a time where anti-Black police violence from the state is at an all time high what else is there to do but come to terms with the fact that America is not the best place for anyone who is not a white able bodied cis male.

It's about time the facade that America is great or ever was comes to an end. This is the same country that had it legal to own other people as property and justice for a murdered 13 year old boy is an impossibility. What does justice for Emmett Till look like at this point in time?

To me a start would be the destruction of the white supremacist, heteronormative patriarchal anti black world that allowed his murderers to be bred from.

From the police force to the justice system to the White House the state must be overturned because we cannot build the Black community and have it flourish in the anti-Black nation we exist in that sits atop the graves of indigenous peoples whose names we never learned.

How many deaths have to happen before we all get mad enough?

Does it have to be your sibling, your parent, your cousin, your friend for you to have had enough? It's time to pick up arms and start fighting the normalization of anti-black, patriarchal, white supremacist, cis normative violence. We need to work on community building so that the people we are out there in the streets with aren't just other angry activists, but family.

We need to love each other past that white supremacist nations have taught us to hate and from there we'll be unstoppable.

Instead of being divisive or not speaking up for murdered Black folk because they were gay, trans, a woman, or gender non-conforming how about you speak up just because they were black too and deserved the right to life.

Turn your hatred towards white supremacist patriarchal capitalistic queerphobic nation states that tear our communities apart and have us living in poverty while they're murdering our children and stealing our resources and labor. The end of America is near it starts when we condemn the flag and everything it stands for and start taking up arms and mobilizing our communities so when the state comes into our hoods to murder our own we can fight the fuck back.

We need to burn the being that is America, that is colonialism, that is anti-Blackness, that is whiteness, that is violence to the ground in order to be free.

Fuck a reform. Fuck a bill passed in white congress. Any law passed in a country founded in white supremacist ideals will only bring violence onto black bodies and will lead us to the same conclusion: the state needs to be destroyed and America needs to die.

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TheDecolonizer DoesThePolice(Cont) Similar things were happening in British India as well as Australia and the Philippines. With colonization the modern police force became a global technology of oppression. The police in every colonized territory were literally the arm of the European colonial administration. They were there to enforce the laws and policies of the colonizing country, oversee the extraction of resources, protect European business and cooperate interests, and by the force of their gun, maintain the European colonial order.

It seemed that no country needed the police more than the United States. The first modern police department in the United States was formed in Boston in 1838. New York City developed one in 1845, Chicago followed in 1851. By the 1880s there was a police department in every major U.S. city in the country. As early as 1904 U.S. Boarder Patrol (then known as the Mounted Watchmen) was actively policing immigrants along the Mexico-United States boarder. These Watchmen targeted latinx people as well as Chinese people and other Asian immigrants.

The United States Indian Police (USIP) was established in 1880 specifically to police American Indians on their land. The so-called "Manifest Destiny" era pushed white settlers westward and more into arms Indigenous resistance. Most notably, the stand-off with Geronimo in 1877 prompted calls for a federally supported police agency charged with policing Native peoples in Indian Country. Of the USIP's main objectives was to smash Indigenous resistance, force Natives to attend boarding schools, control Native populations on the reservations and report back to the United States colonial government. Today, Native people are more likely than any other group to be killed by police.

The pig was/ is also the enforcer of gendered violence. As early as the 1950s police were arresting persons who did not wear "gender appropriate" clothing and those suspected of being queer. Police officers raided gay bars and arrested trans and queer people who were charged with "sexual deviancy." Today, trans people are one of the groups most likely to be harassed by police. Pigs have a long history of

harassing and violating sex workers. Police are the The Pol ice Academy number one perpetrators of domestic violence.

Indoctrination into the policing group-think begins at the police The job of the police has always been to protect academy, where all humanity a officer white property, secure settler occupation, and quell Black, Brown, and Indigenous resistance. The might have had is systematically extinguished. Officers are taught how to nature of the job is inherently violent and it is through this violence that the officer sustains and be pigs: They are taught to shoot first, they are taught that criminals are people legitimizes empire. In the words of Frantz Fanon: of color, they are taught to pursue those "In the colonies, the official, legitimate agent, the people for minor drug offenses. They are spokes-person for the colonizer and the regime of taught how to fill prisons and police oppression, is the officer or soldier." quotas.

The Pol ice Today Timothy Loehmann killed Tamir Rice. No charges.

Peter Lang killed Akai Gurley. No charges. Officers who killed Sandra Bland face no charges. Officer who killed Koryn Gains. No charges. Officers threw Freddie Gray into the back of a police van. No charges. Dante Servin was off duty when he shot and killed Rekia Boyd. No charges. Daniel Pantaleo used an illegal choke-hold to kill Eric Garner. No charges, but the brown man who filmed Garner's death is now serving four years in Rikers Island.

According to Huffington Post a police officer hasn't been convicted of murder or manslaughter in an officer involved shooting since 2013! Only thirteen police officers have been convicted since 2005. There is estimated to be roughly 1,000 police involved killings a year. To date, no high-profile police brutality case has ever seen a police officer come out with criminal charges. And these are the cases that get national attention.

Countless others don't.

The Chicago police department is involved in at least two major cover-ups involving officer involved killings, all of which have gone on with the cooperation of Mayor Rahm Emanuel. There is corruption at every level of every police department because police will never indict their own. Police, judges, district attorneys, investigators, unions and politicians all work together to protect police officers.

The police can kill people and get away with it.

They can kill people of color and get away with it.

And because the police are trusted with investigating themselves, there is no apparatus in place that can successfully hold them accountable.

Many departments have been observed using pictures of Black and Brown people for target practice. There is a particular kind of gun culture that festers within the academy that is inherently racist, homophobic, and patriarchal. Sexual violence occurs behind closed doors and in silence. The academy is a cesspool where the white supremacist social conditioning involved in being a citizen of empire is amplified and weponized.

Piggies are fed a steady diet of pro-police propaganda. They consume bullshit histories of the police, devour patriotic stories of being on the force and regurgitate. And most importantly, they are made to think that they are actually here to serve and protect people. Their self-righteousness inspires police to protect their sense of authority by any means at their disposal, even in non-threatening situations. Because their authority is the states authority.

Abuse is widely used in the academy to promote group-think and hive-mind mentalities as former cop and author of the book "The Truth About Cops" Tim Dees explains: "Some of the practices amount to a form of hazing, a process where the recruit has to show real determination and tenacity to make it through the training. There may be a lot of yelling, name-calling, or doing push-ups for minor infractions. A common practice is to punish the entire

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class when any member makes a mistake.

This supposedly builds 'class cohesion.'"

The pig is broken into when they attach themselves to the symbols of power: the badge, the uniform, and the gun. They become familiar and accustomed to using force. They learn how to physically restrain someone. They learn how to use militarize weapons. They learn how to conduct interrogations and emotionally manipulate people.

The pig also soon learns that they can get away with almost anything they do to people. Because on the force there is a code of silence and an intense identity politic that ensures sworn allegiance to the policing structure.

After all of the training, the classes, and the conditioning a pig is born. A person has become an agent of the state, a colonial chess piece and an object used to sustain white supremacy and colonial power. The academy prepares officers to kill in the service of that power. Their final transformation will occur on the job, where they can put what they learn into practice.

To be a police officer is to be the opposite of a human being.

Pol ice In Communit ies Of Col or In poor communities of color the police can be found patrolling the lines that segregate the community from the rich white neighborhoods.

As always, the priority is the protection of white settler property. Across the roads leading to white suburbia or the opulent white metropole there are police at every border and every crossing.

At the transition between a so-called "good neighborhood" and a so-called "bad neighborhood" police are stationed and on the look-out. After housing discrimination, the police officer is the primary enforcer of red-lining.

When police are active in Black and Brown

communities, it is most often for non-violent drug offenses.

War-on-drugs policies initiated by the Nixon and Regan administrations have set the precedence for policing in communities of color for decades. What is often called "broken windows policing" is a practice that targets people for such offenses as drug possession, loitering, trespassing, disorderly conduct, "disturbing the peace," and prostitution. The stop-and-frisk polices initiated in New York City virtually permitted officers to stop and pat-down anyone at any time for any reason. Operation "Clean Halls" program even let NYPD officers conduct stop-and-frisk procedures inside the persons apartment building.

These encounters are always deadly.

According to Campaign Zero at least 287 people were killed by police in 2014 for minor non-violent offenses.

Ironically, in neighborhoods of color with high homicide rates, there are no police around to speak of. As David Kennedy of the Washington Post explains, an over policing for non-violent offenses in communities of color is often mirrored by an "under policing" of violent crimes: "You'd be experiencing what families in stressed black neighborhoods have experienced forever- very high rates of arrest for minor offenses white folks routinely get away with, and shockingly low arrest rates for serious violent crime." What Ruth Wilson Gilmore termed "organized abandonment" is the purposeful and strategic neglect of communities of color to inflict coercive control.

Pigs are essentially always around to arrest someone for loitering, never around to investigate homicides and little energy is spent bringing these cases to justice. Yet the crisis of unchecked violence in communities of color actually inspires calls for more policing and works to solidify police legitimacy. In reality pigs don't give a shit if some Black or Brown person is killed in the ghetto. White settler safety first.

Pol ice and t he Prison Indust rial Compl ex

Of course, the reason why police care so much about non-violent offenses is because it is where the money is. In most departments, state and federal funding for drug task force programs are based on the number of arrests made and the amount of drugs and other property retrieved from drug busts. Asset forfeiture laws permit law enforcement agencies seize property with little to no justification. That property is then used to turn over profits for the department and justify program funding increases. Since 2001 it is estimated that over $2.6 billion in seizures were taken from people who were never even charged with a crime. This provides a financial incentive for police to target the most petty low-level drug offenders and actively seek to incarcerate them.

Police arrest quotas ensure that every pig is doing their part to arrest more and more people. Once again, these quotas are used to measure department performance and secure more state and federal funding. Police also have quotas for the number of traffic tickets they issue. If a pig is not meeting their quotas they could actually be fired from the force (but if they kill someone its all good! Desk duty!). As you can imagine, pigs do what they can to inflate their numbers, including but not limited to: arresting people of color for non-violent offenses.

In the prison industrial complex, everyone on the payroll gets paid. Officers all the way to judges, prosecutors, politicians, and prison lobbyist are all there to make sure bodies go through the prison system and serve longer sentence. And private and federal prisons collect the check.

In the United States at least 2 million prisoners are working for pennies or for free for companies who contract with private and federal prisons. Some of these companies include IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Texas Instruments, Dell, Honeywell and Hewlett-Packard. The colonial federal government also capitalize by using prison labor to produce things like license plates and state military equipment.

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Take Your Ice Cream and Shove It These bastards actually think that pulling people of color over to serve them ice cream is going to change things. In a disgusting public relations stunt pulled by police departments in August, police officers were stopping people in their cars to give them ice cream. As if the triggering effects of being stopped by police were bad enough, to think a fucking ice cream cone can make up for the millions of deaths at the hands of police added insult to injury.

But this wouldn't be the first time police try to cozy up to the public. Public relations is actually a cornerstone of policing used to manufacture police legitimacy. Across the country, all kinds of pro police-community relations initiatives, police-community BBQs, basketball with the police, bring-an-officer-to school-day, all teeter this funny line of legitimacy and manufactured consent. Not to mention the virtually useless "community-police review boards" which, to be sure, have absolutely no power and (surprises, surprises) are usually infiltrated by the police. No community-police initiative has ever been able to stop the flow of militarized weapons into police departments, channel police funding into other areas, or challenge police authority.

Most importantly, no such initiative has ever stopped officer-involved killings.

To Ref orm The Pol ice Is a waste of time. At this point in our discussion if you still believe police reform is a viable option THE DECOLONIZER needs you to stop reading this article.

As it turns out police reform actually strengthens the policing structure in its ability to police and kill us. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Michelle Alexander and other scholars have noted, police reform usually means more funding and resources for police departments.

The call for more body cameras, dash cameras, and similar devices mean more surveillance of communities, especially because cameras are not just on when someone gets killed. Many of them are on 24 hours a day and feed directly into department monitoring systems.

Police "racial sensitivity" and "implicit bias" trainings very often fail to make a difference and are used by police departments as another public relations front. Officers are paid to attend these trainings which are very often a waste of everyones time. Because policing culture reaffirms white supremacist behavior once the training in over. Besides, sensitivity trainings will never get the pigs to understand that they shouldn't exist.

Do We Need The Pol ice?

The illusion that civil society needs the police is the single biggest croc of bullshit liberals have contributed to the police discussion. Yet the police, as we have known them to be, are a fairly new institution only emerging within the past century or so. For most of the worlds history people have gotten along just fine without formal policing structures.

The police are only essential in so far as they help secure a global white supremacist colonial system. If you have investments in this system and the property and resources it affords to you then yes you probably do need the police.

People have been settling disputes, protecting each other, and pursuing justice communally for thousands of years. When healthy and functional, communities are fully capable of resolving their own issues without police.

The reemergence of restorative justice programs stand as one example. In a restorative justice model offenders are confronted by community members, often (but not always) with the victim of the crime present. They then sort out a fair and transformative resolution in which all parties can agree to.

There have been "keep the piece" programs organized in cities like Chicago where former gang members have worked independently to intervene and prevent gang violence from happening. The Audre Lorde Project?s Safe Outside the System program empowers communities to intervene and prevent anti-LGBTQIA+ violence. People?s Community Medics is an organization created by Black women in the Oakland, CA area that provide an alternative to emergency medical care.

There could be far more alternative possibilities for policing once the people shift their focus from police reform to police abolition.

Do Not Cal l The Pol ice We can start discovering what it would mean to live without police by not calling 911.

In December of last year a domestic dispute was brewing inside a home Chicago. 19-year-old Quintonio LeGrier was swinging a baseball bat and having a mental health crisis. His father called 911. Pigs showed up at the door of the complex. When Betty Jones, their downstairs neighbor, opened the door she was "accidentally" shot and killed on site. Police then gunned down Quintonio. Two people were buried because police responded to a 911 call. And a father had to bury his son.

Extra-judicial killings happen most frequently at police traffic stops and when someone calls 911.

If you are calling 911 on a person of color you are endangering that persons life. If you are a person of color calling 911 you are endangering your life.

Al l Cops All cops are shit. All cops are the enforcers of colonial violence. They are the arm of the white supremacist policing state. All of them are complicit in the killings. All of them are illegitimate. All of them will defend their peers and their bloody profession before they defend the public.

Every cop is dehumanized by their participation on the force. This is regardless of who they are or what they have done on the force. Regardless of how "nice" they are perceived to be. They are not here to "protect and serve" but to repress and annihilate. ACAB.

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Next Year ThisTim e

by Taylar Nuevelle In 2013 I sat in the common area of the Secure Female Facility Hazelton (SFF Hazelton), surrounded by over a 150 women. I watched as they waited to heat up their Thanksgiving meals in the microwaves; food that had been put together ahead of time for us, so that the staff did not have to wait around and allow us to eat a meal that was warm because they needed to get on with their holiday at home, with their own families.

I sat with my large turkey leg (they were too cheap and lazy to make us a real turkey at this prison) and a bunch of other crap that had been carelessly prepared and thrown together into Styrofoam containers. Suddenly it hit me and I sang out at the top of my lungs, ?This is my last Thanksgiving in prison!? Many of the women stopped and clapped and others joined in yelling out it was their last one as well.

The countdown began. On my birthday I made the same announcement, ?This is my last birthday in prison.? Then Christmas and New Year?s? you get the picture.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBOP) allows mp3 players and has contracted with an outside, for profit, company to provide secure players (at a high price for inmates) and access to purchase music from a database of approved music. Any music with ?explicit? lyrics is excluded; or if discovered removed from the database.

I had downloaded Diana Ross?s ?I?m Coming Out?: "I?m coming out I want the world to know I got to let it show There's a new me coming out And I just had to live"

Biggie Smalls version of it as well:

"Uhh, uhhh B.I.G., P-O, P-P-A No info, for the, DEA Federal agents mad cause I'm flagrant "

Although the DEA had nothing to do with my case.

The last three months of my incarceration I would walk the compound, music blasting through my ears and singing at the top of my lungs, ?I?m coming out. I want the world know, got to let to show.? I sang this so often, Correctional Officers and my fellow sisters surviving incarceration would greet me with this song as the count down began. ?There?s a brand new me...? I was released from prison on June 26, 2014 and my brother picked me up.

On September 15, 2014, I was arrested just outside of the doors of the psychiatric unit at George Washington Hospital. I had become suicidal the week before when I was notified that someone had phoned in a lie about my whereabouts despite the fact that I was wearing a GPS monitor. I fell apart.

On November 2, 2014 I received a call at the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA/ CTF DC)? the private jail where DC women are incarcerated? from one of the Regional Director?s of the BOP. This is what he told me, ?Well Ms. Nuevelle there was a mistake made and so we are letting you go back to the halfway house.?

I was in the case manger?s office and I started to weep, but then I became angry and I said to the man on the other end of the phone who had robbed me of my newly found freedom, ?What do you mean you made a mistake? You didn?t make a mistake you did the bidding of someone else and harmed me. When are you letting me go?? December 1, 2014 was his answer. Not only did he admit to making a mistake, he refused to let me leave before Thanksgiving. ?These things take time,? he explained. ?I?ll get you out before your birthday and Christmas. How does that sound?? It sounded like bullshit and I told him as much. Then he gave me this warning, ?Your case involves some complexities and important people and you need to be very careful.

DC is small and we made a mistake, but you need to be very careful.? I asked him, ?Why don?t you just say it? Say the truth. Admit what really happened.? His response, ?We cannot have this conversation on the phone, but please be careful.? Then he hung up.

In 2014, I spent Thanksgiving at CCA/ CTF DC. I was not bitter or frightened? but very suicidal. I had served over four and a half years unjustly in prison. I had no

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legal expertise on my side or allies during my trial and appeal, but I survived. What made the re-arrest so emotionally debilitating, was that someone chose to play politics with my life? Again. ?The mistake,? robbed me of my freedom and joy from the year before in which I had believed I was spending my last Thanksgiving incarcerated.

Reentry is not only about freedom, it is about survival and there is no such option of, ?Next Year This Time? ? because we returning citizens do not even know about tomorrow this time. After incarceration we literally live hour to hour. In an hour your job can be snatched from you or you can be walking down the street and be arrested for no reason and then told two months later, ?Sorry our bad.?

We citizens who return from jails and prison walk on eggshells. We do not question if the other shoe will fall, but rather when it hits will we be able to sustain the damage and keep moving forward.

I do not focus on next year, or next week. This is what I know; I spent Thanksgiving 2015 ? after six years of separation? with my best friend Erin and her son in Santa Cruz, California.

I know t his t rut h: This year, at t his t ime, I just want t o l ive? t here?s a brand new me!

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HowTo's HowtoO rganizeAPoliceW atch The police watch is an organized (sometimes armed) group of grass-roots community members who take-up the responsibility of observing the the police in action. Where all other systems of police accountability fail, the police watch carries out face to face encounters with the police in order to record their behavior and hopefully deter them from brutalizing, harassing, and murdering people.

When The Black Panther Party first emerged in 1966 it was most known in the Black community for the Panther Patrols. These patrols consisted of anywhere from three to six people who would follow the police on Friday and Saturday nights and observe them in their actions. Panthers brought with them at least one camera, a law book, a tape recorder, and a few loaded guns.

Beyond its practical function, police watch groups work really well in conjunction with anti-police campaigns. Information attained from observing local police activity can be used to build a case for eliminating police occupation of communities. As with the Panthers, an armed police watch group can inspire more armed resistance within the local community. Police watch groups in cooperation with grassroots alternatives to policing can make police in the area obsolete. In fact, for a time in Oakland, CA the Panther Patrols did become the alternative and many people called on the Panthers to settle domestic disputes.

Monitoring the police is still a very dangerous undertaking, especially when arms are involved. Even when you are perfectly within the law, your life will always be in danger. Never form a police watch if you are not prepared for the risks.

Step 1: Study the Law Before setting up any watch group you must first study the laws of your state or country carefully. Your rights to observe a police officer may vary depending on where you live. In the United States the constitutional right of free assembly ensures that anyone may observe a police officer when they are a reasonable distance away. A "reasonable" distance is considered far enough away that you do not physically interfere with an officers work. Ten feet is probably doable. Even so, an officer may still try to arrest for obstruction of justice. In open-carry states you can still observe a police officer with a gun as long as the gun is visible. You have a right to take pictures and film any officer as long as the device is visible. Knowing the law will not save you form police violence but is still helpful should you be arrested.

Step 2: Form Your Group Form a group of like-minded individuals who are serious and understand the risks involved in observing the police. They should be people who can be trusted and can grow to trust each other. The members should have a working knowledge of the laws regarding a persons right to observe the police or be open to learning. It is very important for your group to be made up of members who actually live in the area. A grassroots police watch will have more popular support from the community and will directly involve them in the monitoring of police. Decide if the group will be armed.

Step 3: Training Anything could happen when a police officer is watched and feels threatened. While you and your group may not be prepared for every situation that arises it is still very important that you walk through the possibilities in detail so that all members know what to do. If possible try setting up a police watch training or teach-in where situations can reenacted and scenarios can be worked out as a group. Keep in mind that some of the most dangerous situations are when a officer draws their weapon on a group member or calls for back-up.

Step 4: Popular Support Remember that the community who is being policed should be involved at every level of this process. They should be among your ranks as well as the body that holds your group accountable. Organize a community forum in which you announce the police watch group and its objectives to the people. Outline how the community will hold the police watch accountable. There should be a phone number or main contact available so that the people can call on the watch when necessary. Collect email and contact information so that your group can communicate with the people. Set up a database system so all information collected from police observations is made available to the people. Finally, schedule future meetings where your group reports back to the people.

Step 5: Setting Up The Watch Before you venture out as a group to conduct watch activities you will first want to set up a bail-out system. The chances of you or any member of your group being arrested by the police is extremely high. Having everyone contribute to a bail fund before hand will ensure that you can get your members out of prison as quickly as possible. Set up a schedule when the watch is active and decide on areas where the watch will be located. If your group is big enough divide the members so that no less than three are active in a given area. Four or five people is more preferable.

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DeclonizingCulture Bookof themonth: A Taste Of Power Elaine Brown assumed her role as the first and only female leader of the Black Panther Party with these words: ?I have all the guns and all the money. I can withstand challenge from without and from within. Am I right, Comrade?? It was August 1974. From a small Oakland-based cell, the Panthers had grown to become a revolutionary national organization, mobilizing black communities and white supporters across the country? but relentlessly targeted by the police and the FBI, and increasingly riven by violence and strife within. How Brown came to a position of power over this paramilitary, male-dominated organization, and what she did with that power, is a riveting, unsparing account of self-discovery.

Filmof themonth: Black I s... Black Ain't The final film by filmmaker Marlon Riggs, Black Is...Black Ain't, jumps into the middle of explosive debates over Black identity. Black Is...Black Ain't is a film every African American should see, ponder and discuss.

White Americans have always stereotyped African Americans. But the rigid definitions of "Blackness" that African Americans impose on each other, Riggs claims, have also been devastating. Is there an essential Black identity? Is there a litmus test defining the real Black man and true Black woman?

Riggs uses his grandmother's gumbo as a metaphor for the rich diversity of Black identities. His camera traverses the country, bringing us face to face with Black folks young and old, rich and poor, rural and urban, gay and straight, grappling with the paradox of numerous, often contested definitions of Blackness.

Artist of themonth: Sam m us "I am a producer and rapper who speaks candidly about her experiences as a black girl, a graduate student, a nerd, and an activist, among other things. It has become critical to me to share the highs and lows of my personal life through my art, not just as a way to heal myself, but as a way to give voice to the

Photo credit: Zoloo Brown and Vrinda Jagota

experiences of friends and black folks who may never have as big a platform as I have. It is my hope that my music and my performances will affirm those who share my experiences, and challenge those who do not. I believe that all black lives matter, and that we cannot be free until each of them is protected."

-Sammus

W ordof themonth: I dentity Politics This month's word is identity politics.

Identity Politics (noun): A political position that superficially groups identities based on rigid social categories, often for the purpose of political opportunism. Some identity politics want to absolve people of all accountability because of their race, class, gender or sexuality. Other forms of identity politics use skin color, gender, or sexuality alone a marker of political unity instead of a persons actual political orientation.

Identity Politics in a sentence: Many otherwise conservative "Hoteps" (Black people who glorify Egypt) use identity politics to homogenize Black people and make universal claims about "Blackness."

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ThisIsABigFuckYouToStudents:TheUncensored VersionO f The#FeesMustFallMovem ent In reality, the government has acted to completely rebut their promise through proposing nationwide fee increases. This betrayal sped up the timetable of the #FeesMustFall movement.

The #FeesMustFall movement has received a wide range of attention since its launch, earning its fair share of applause as well as a vast amount of criticism, and now it?s time to debate why South Africa has reached Ground Zero.

The South African student dropout rate is daunting, with 50%- 60%of students dropping out in first year, according to the Director of Academic Development at UJ. Serious problems such as insufficient funds, no transport, lack of accommodation and significantly, a failing to ensure that students have enough to eat are some of the reasons why students are forced to drop out.

By Sispho Mbuli The current situation in our country, South Africa, is tense. The years 2015 and 2016 have seen students from all over the country and different institutions, participating in nationwide protests calling for decolonized tertiary education. These protests are better known as the #FeesMustFall campaign and have created a movement that is mainly composed of determined, fearless Youth. These protests are well into their third week of development.

The #FeesMustFall movement began in October last year as a result of a proposed 10.5%increase to the cost of tertiary education for the year 2016.

Following this announcement, students in their respective institutions protested the proposal, calling instead for a 0%fee increase. The protests were successful and resulted in President Jacob Zuma announcing the demanded 0%increment of tuition fees.

The movement quieted for the remainder of the 2015 year and the first half of this year, acknowledging the victory but wary of a lack of commitment to our call for free education. That wariness was proven valid when, on the 14th of August 2016 the Minister of Higher Education and Training, Blade Nzimande, recommended a maximum of 8%fee increase for the year 2017. This ultimately left the decision in the hands of the universities, making it clear that a 0%increase was no longer considered viable.

Nzimande assured the country that the government would provide financial assistance to students with an annual income below R600 000 ($42 283), in order to subsidize the increase. This would be provided by the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS). This is, however, very contradictory, as free education is a legal obligation which was made by the South African government in 1994 and every year since, but has not actually been followed through to date.

Over the years, due to increasing fees, the majority of South Africans have become unable to pay tuition; these universities have turned into exclusive spaces meant primarily for those who can afford it i.e. the white population. It is a real shame that a poor but academically excellent and deserving student is deprived of the opportunity to extricate herself and by extension her immediate family from poverty because of no money.

The lack of quality education in South Africa is as a result of the racist policies of the past and present, implemented under the legislation of the Apartheid regime. The Apartheid government implemented targeted forms of racial, gendered and class oppression through its laws and socio- political economic system, the effects of which still radiate today. The legacy left behind

by Apartheid is immeasurable. It can be seen in the lack of access to quality healthcare, sufficient housing, sanitation, security and most notably ? education. It can be seen in the income disparities between racial groups (black, white, POC and Indian); in the white supremacist standards of our sufficiently funded Model- C schools where majority students are white, and the frequent misalloctation of government funds.

The white population is the only race to have benefited from Apartheid and continues to do so to this day, consistently enforced by neo- colonial capitalism. This has resulted in a vast majority of our country being denied their basic human rights, ensuring that the black population are structurally prevented from advancing themselves in society by the very same system that so greatly benefits the white population.

It is simple people. We can no longer afford to silently watch these systems violently oppress and exclude People of Colour (POC). Thousands of students have been expelled from their universities because they have outstanding fees, no matter their academic performance. These institutions are public, funded by the government and are open to all, supposedly.

These students are burdened with difficulties that follow them into the classroom. Students who drop out normally skip a year or more to get a job or funds to pay for outstanding fees. It is time we speak up and the #FeesMustFall movement aims to dismantle these oppressive structures which privilege the white population in the country.

Now let?s tackle the #FeesMustFall demands. These demands are not unreasonable. They seek to restructure this country?s poor and stagnant economy. They envision justice with regards to race, gender, ability and class. #FeesMustFall protesters have asserted that free education IS feasible and IS needed for the uplifting of our people from poverty and for transformation of post- apartheid society. Students are questioning the delivery of the promises of equality that have been enshrined in our Constitution.

This is a mass social movement that is fighting for a fundamental economic transition and for the completion of an economic revolution.

The youth of South Africa are questioning how they are supposed to get themselves out of poverty if they cannot afford the required tool needed to combat poverty, namely education.

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They want an education that resembles the society it is supposed to create and serve, not recreating its colonial past or serving existing colonial powers.

The best way to eliminate inequality is by making sure that the opportunities afforded to South Africans of different backgrounds are as equal as is realistically possible. Our university system serves to perpetuate intergenerational poverty, and if we ignore this, we are betraying our next generation.

We are betraying the very content of our struggle for freedom. We need ways of fast- tracking a fundamental socio- economic transformation which systematically reduces the excesses of intergenerational wealth accumulation.

One of the critical demands of the #FeesMustFall protesters is an end to outsourcing. Institutions of higher learning in South Africa pay employees poverty- level wages (as low as R3000/ $211 per month) for full- time workers. Workers are provided with little or no pension funds as well as no access to affordable quality healthcare.

These institutions profit from the pain and struggle of the black working class; a direct consequence of colonialism and Apartheid which have created an entire class working under unfair conditions.

Student asks police why the police are aiming their guns at her and insinuates that it is merely because she is peacefully sitting on the ground reading a textbook.

In 20 years, the unemployment rate has risen from 22%to 25%under the unreliable, neo- liberalism favouring government of the lost African National Congress (ANC, the ruling party). It must be stressed that the success and economic empowerment of black people is essential to the success of the country, as they are 80.2%of the population, and all other races combined are 19.8%. So, with black unemployment being 39%(white unemployment: 8.3%), this is damaging to the future of South Africa, especially if there are systems in place to exclude people from wealth, and keep them indefinitely in the same circumstances Apartheid left them in.

A study done by Finscope South Africa found that on average, black South Africans spend more of their income on education compared to other races; 7%average vs. 4.3%average for other races respectively. This then highlights the difficult task of raising their children out of poverty; which notably affects black women the most.

* Reference K anye West lyr ics: HANDS UP, WE JUST DOI NG WHAT THE COPS TAUGHT US*

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Certain crowds have labeled the #FeesMustFall movement as ?entitled? and ?disruptive? however, we have received support from many members of the academic staff, workers at our various institutions of higher learning, the South African Council of Churches, and parents. The overwhelming truth is that the disruptions that have taken place during the protests have illuminated the normalized oppressive conditions that are silently embedded in and protected by our law.

The movement has also been critiqued for its violent nature, but violence has never been the goal of our resistance and struggle for justice.

The #FeesMustFall campaign has held peaceful protests, such as sit- ins, at various institutions and has been met with police brutality and harassment. We have had to take measures which are more excessive in order for our muffled voices to be heard.

When our outcry has not been acknowledged by the state or universities, we see no reason why it is beyond the pale for us to turn to alternate methods of protest to help address this pressing issue. The media has portrayed us ? the protesters ? as thugs and has criminalized students. But the blatant truth is that the violence that can be seen from the students is simply reactionary violence.

The burden of being non- violent is not on the oppressed, but rather on the oppressor.

Therefore violence of the state has been responded to by the burning of any building that represents state authority. In response to peaceful protest, universities have militarized their campuses, sought wide- ranging interdicts against students and deployed private security guards. The critique of violent protests- mainly perpetuated by the white population ? is disingenuous and doesn?t offer any valid alternative solution. This has shown how white people condemn the inconvenience imposed on them by disruptive protests but are inherently blind to the sustained inconvenience and disempowerment which affects POC. During these past few weeks, students have been subject to police brutality as well as private security brutality through the use of physical force, rubber bullets, tear gas, stun grenades and pepper spray aimed directly and maliciously at protesting students and have resulted in serious injuries and hospitalization in many instances. This has also coincided with the dramatic increase in multi- million rand private security contracts that have exercised excessive force and threatened students consistently.

This includes threats of sexual harassment. This violence has even escalated to the use of live ammunition on students, following the recent events of Thursday 13 October that occurred at Tshwane University of Technology, where a student was shot in the leg. A significant portion of the blame for the increasing violence of the protests needs to be placed at the door of both university authorities and government. The presence of police on our campuses is poisoning our environment. We are sensing an inherent injustice in how our case is being handled.

The South African Police Service (SAPS) cannot solve South Africa?s political and socio- economic problems. Political problems require political solutions, not military ones. The government have failed to lead the dialogues with students or intervene in the wide- scale protests in our country.

We note, with great concern, the presidential task team established to resolve the higher education crisis which consists ? in part ? of the state security cluster and police commissioner with the unconscionable exclusion of the finance minister, Pravin Gordhan. This move demonstrates the government?s utter disinterest in resolving the principles underpinning the demands of students and workers across the country. If it is the violence that we are against with such conviction, why don?t we condemn the perpetual violence of the status quo?

Education is a human right, and therefore a public good. With the first breath you take as you are born, in that same moment, you claim your rights.

No force in the world can take those rights away from you. We seek to educate and learn more about the future and possibilities of free, decolonised, quality education. IT IS POSSIBLE. IT IS POSSIBLE. Black people have freed themselves from the evils and human rights violations of colonialism and Apartheid and we reiterate, economically, black people are still colonised.

Education changes lives, and our goal is almost in our grasp. Our eyes are open, and we see the future clearly.

#FeesMustFall will economically emancipate the poor black masses. #FeesMustFall will change millions of South Africans lives forever. #FeesMustFall is the start of Africans taking back control of their lives. #FeesMustFall must succeed. #FeesMustFall will succeed.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION Demographics: -

Population - 54.3 million

Black - 80.2% White - 8.4% Coloured - 8.8% Indian/ Asain - 2.5% According to Finance24, corruption has cost the South African economy an estimated R700bn since the establishment of the new democracy over 20 years ago. That amounts to about R30bn per year. If an average undergraduate degree costs around R120 000, then in one year alone, the government could have funded 250 000 student?s higher education. Here is a list of other mismanaged funds: Zuma announces 0% fee increase for 2016.

Ndzimande recommends 8% cap on fee increase for 2017.

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TheHairlessApe'sNewClothes Beliefs can survive potent logical or empirical challenges. They can survive and even be bolstered by evidence that most uncommitted observers would agree logically demands some weakening of such beliefs. They can even survive the total destruction of their original evidential bases. ? Lee Ross and Craig Anderson, On the origins and maintenance of erroneous social assessments

By Siddiq Kiaam Kabir Khan

If Jan Van Riebeek1 had related to our ancestors as a friend rather than an instrument of colonial conquest; if he brought with him the most modern technology available today and decided to share it as a gift, and left it to the indigenous peoples to decide how they were going to use it, what might South Africans have made of their destiny?

All the talk about decolonisation these days expresses an accurate recognition of the unfinished nature of previous liberation movements and an admirable desire by a new generation ? "young, and with the wisdom of youth" ? to continue the struggle until victory.

Yet at present, beyond a certain limited focus on colonial symbols, much of this discourse remains all too vague. What would it mean today, practically speaking, for a people to make a concrete, radical break from the poverty and misery of their colonial inheritance? How do we act when history is on our side?

The fool, the child, the joker, the prophet and the artist have historically been accorded a measure of indulgence for utterances which would otherwise provoke the most unacceptable scandal. The double- edged nature of this ostensible priviledge is the fact that their apparent freedom of expression was always accompanied by an even more liberal denigration towards any profoundly uncomfortable truths they were allowed to utter.

In the history of civilisation, which until recently has adopted a near- universal authoritarian form, they each presented a particular case of what has in modern bourgeois democracy become a general

rule: expression is free on the condition that it is not taken seriously.

Laughing in the face of those 'w inds of change' which swept through the colonial world in the second half of the previous century, the great Nigerian satirist Fela Kuti released an album of his typically infectious afro- beat called Gentlemen, with a monkey dressed in a suit on the cover. If this was not suitably unambiguous, his lyrics ensured there was no mistaking the target of his mirth: the ridiculous slavish adoption by oppressed people of the master's ways ? which had previously been excoriated in equally blunt terms by Malcolm X in his infamous parable of the House Negro and the Field Negro. Yet, since these and similar critiques were made, the empty promises of colonial civilisation have been enthusiastically persued by seemingly every inmate of the neocolonial world despite the fact that it has never benefited any but a tiny minority.

What is astonishing is not so much the adoption of a purported western culture at the expense of its supposedly traditional equivalent ? any cursory survey will reveal a process involving a more or less complex fusion rather than simple replacement ? but the complete and universal voluntary submission to the slavery and economic exploitation which initially had to be imposed by brute force.

It is not surprising that the rich, who at first could procure cheap labour only through the imposition of colonial taxes, now laugh at the poor who clamber for the most degrading jobs by their millions: the old ways of subsistence through which people supported themselves have long been destroyed.

What is surprising is the fact that new forms of subsistence have not been invented now that colonised populations are no longer openly declared savages to be freely exploited by an occupying force in the name of civilisation, but citizens to be guaranteed a life of dignity and respect. For it is self- evident that the pauperised masses of the neo- colonial lands languish in poverty precisely because modern production has rendered the labour of most redundant, whilst the few who are still needed for menial jobs are paid peanuts (the wages of most South African working people ? up to 95%in sectors such as domestic work and agriculture ? fall well below the 'poverty line') due to the huge competition among job- seekers.

Today less than 2 percent of the population grows all food farmed in the United Snakes of Amerikkka.

Is it conceivable that our ancestors, who never slaved half as much as we do, given access to new means of satisfying their basic needs a thousand times more efficiently than before, would have, of their own accord, set up a system where half the population spends the better part of their existence in monotonous soul- destroying drudgery while the other half rots in idle poverty, all for the sake of accumulating obscene amounts of useless commodities for a few chiefs and their hangers- on?

Is it not more likely that they would use what we laughably call labour- saving devices so that everyone actually works less, and lives more? Why has not a single neo- colonial society ever tried to do this after so- called independence? Why is this possibility, the only rational solution to the social question, never even mentioned? Why does everyone admire the beauty of an illusory social development rather than admit to the hideous decrepitude of a maggot- ridden body- politic ritually submitted to the bankrupt superstitious witch- doctoring of "economic growth", "foreign investment" and "service delivery'"?

Since nearly half the South African workforce today is unemployed, and the other half over- worked and underpaid, with no reasonable prospect of change in sight, the obvious thing to do would be simply to halve the working- day and thereby double the number of jobs. It might be objected that under the wage system this arrangement would also mean halving the salaries of workers, who would thus be unable to support themselves.

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So much the worse for the wage system. Just as property is the result of a con- job whereby the wealth of the entire planet was turned into an exclusive possession of the ruling class, so too money is a result of a conjuring trick whereby the victims of modern servitude are forced to work for the sake of worthless pieces of paper whose value is based on nothing but the authority of the government.

Title deeds and fiat currency, the foundations of the modern economy, are no less imaginary fabrications than the invisible regalia of the royal imbecile in Hans Christian Anderson's all too prescient fable. Abolish the whole irrational swindle ? together with the miserable swine who control it ? and you no longer have any problem.

When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the businessman? None of our ancestors demanded "a fair day's work for a fair day's pay" before they were yoked into imperialist slavery.

There is no evidence those who had for millenia lived and laboured communally for themselves without the benefit of money ever suffered for it, whilst a painful plenitude of disastrous evidence daily demonstrates the disgraceful deprivation of their modern day descendants, now shamefully reduced to the role of compliant servants.

It is characteristic of the malaise of our times that a monopoly on the definition of reality is currently held by those who resolutely reduce it to a series of empty abstractions. Such people would dismiss the possibility of any serious movement to eliminate the misery of this world as unrealistic due to constraints imposed by economic laws invented precisely to justify that misery. They will say "emerging markets" lack the capital to accomplish such a project, forgetting the fact that capital is not a thing but a social relation.

The unprecedented industrial development of Mao's China and Stalin's Russia was achieved through massive use of forced labour, and accomplished for the sake of a military - bureaucratic class. These are presented as warnings to those who speak of alternatives to capitalist development, yet anyone alive today can plainly recognise that China is nothing more than another form of capitalism, as were all so- called socialist states.

Beneath the abstractions of ideology, everyday life in these workers' republics was and is the same joyless hellish round of work - commute - tv- sleepcommute- work- commute - tv ? a suicidal spiral of

pre- colonial past. "The traditional cultures are in any case doomed," wrote Gary Snyder, "and rather than cling to their good aspects hopelessly it should be remembered that whatever is or ever was in any other culture can be reconstructed... In fact, it is my own view that the coming revolution will close the circle and link us in many ways with the most creative aspects of our archaic past.'

We will rid ourselves of the lies and chains of our masters not by looking backwards, but forwards.

The point is to recognise the possibility, for the billions currently condemned to purgatory in 'emerging markets', of defining our own course of

alienation whose only relief is one or another variety of madness or death.

Yet there is no law in history, society or nature which condemns all human beings on this earth to act as mere grist for "the dark satanic mills" before their dreams of security, abundance and ease come within reach. Nor is it pre- determined by the character of pre- conquest societies that their traditions of communal tenure and mutual- aid could not have assimilated the most modern means of production in order to '"leap over'" the purgatory of an interminable economic pseudo- development in which we have wallowed for centuries (a possibility that was explicitly recognised by Marx at the end of his life with regard to the Russian peasant commune, though most Marxists prefer to ignore it).

The most advanced technologies being developed today, from small- scale aluminium extractors which allow the world's most abundant metal to be mined from ordinary sand, to 3D printers, self- replicating automated fabrication laboratories, and off- the- grid renewable energy, all make the decentralised construction of modern infrastructure more easy than it has ever been, to the extent that a mode of subsistence based the existence of material scarcity for anybody, and a mode of social development based on dependence towards neo- imperialist powers, are both becoming increasingly inconceivable. Nor is it written in the stars that we can't still alter the catastrophic course of our own destiny immediately, here and now.

This is not to advocate nor even to imagine an unwanted (as well as impossible) return to the

historical development even while our economies are still 'underdeveloped'. Indeed, for most of us, a radically new path is not merely a possibility but a necessity. The reasons are as simple as they are incontrovertible: Firstly, the supposed successes of the advanced economies were achieved at the expense of a process of 'primitive accumulation' that for centuries destroyed generation after generation of European men, women and children by working them like beasts and housing them worse than beasts ? a process that billions of us in the neo- colonial lands know all too well because we are being forced to go through it all over again, all over the world. When Marx wrote that 'capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt', we recognise this blood and dirt as our own, and instinctively want nothing to do with it.

Yet, unless we determine to 'leap over' this horrendous process through a new game of our own invention, we not only sign the warrant for our own condemnation, but also that of our children and grandchildren.

Secondly, the resources available on earth are insufficient to allow more than a small proportion of the neo- colonial population to acquire the colonial way of life. Moreover, even in the West, capitalism?s dreams of abundance lead to nothing more than an abundance of dreams.

The most cursory glance at any aspect of existence in this phoney 'land of opportunity' supplies an abundance of

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evidence for this conclusion: rampant mental illness (one in three suffers some form according to their own experts); suicide (the average citizen of the USA, the most murderous state in the global north, is more likely to kill themselves than die by murder ? and a UK doctor who was also a Labour Party MP seriously suggested poisoning the entire population by putting lithium in the drinking water as a way to 'treat' the inevitable symptoms of an unlivable world); sexual and familial misery (patriarchy thrives in superficially updated forms, most marriages end in divorce and many that survive do so simply out of habit and insecurity); generalised ignorance, illiteracy and stupidity (according to their own government only 15%of US citizens are fully literate at the end of their schooling ?and George W. Bush Jr, an idiot of unprecedented scale, could be elected supreme leader of the free world, twice); epidemic- level obesity, anorexia, diabetes and other chronic illness; total cultural and intellectual bankruptcy (as French author Charles Nodier, observing in 1831 a phenomenon that has continued ever more vigorously to this day, pointed out: ?the peasants of our villages who, a hundred years ago, read legends and fairytales and believed in them, today read the gossip sheets and the newspapers and believe in them. They were foolish; they?ve become stupid ? that?s progress?); poisoned air, polluted water, fake food, hideous cities, universal

insecurity and isolation; spiritual and moral debility (as German author Gunther Anders noted in The Obsolescence of The Human Species, the drudgery of most wage- slaves in the economically advanced countries, who are more like eunuchs guarding and serving harems of commodities than plantation chattel breaking their backs in the field, tends to cripple their bodies less severely than it does their consciences and consciousness); and so on and on and on.

a servile crowd not merely agreed to pretend they admired the imaginary suit worn by a self- important ape, but were seized by a mass hysteria in which everybody truly believed they saw things which proved to be mirages ? phantoms like 'progress', 'liberation', and 'democracy'.

For it is undeniable that today all the politicians and their parties, all the professors and their theories, all the demagogues and their Yet despite the fact that, as Mustapha Khayati ideologies, all the journalists and their stories, said, 'the only people who are really all the businessmen and their lies, have underdeveloped are those who see a positive nothing to say regarding the most vital value in the power of their masters' ? the rush to problems that confront us, the crises which catch up with the most modern alienation never ceased to plague us since our supposed continues to sweep us along unimpeded like national liberation, other than the same stale lemmings over the side of a cliff. rhetorical garbage, the same vapid platitudinous abstractions, the same glittering Cognitive scientists claim to have discovered the generalities which their predecessors, and their phenomenon of belief persistence. They say that predecessors' predecessors, have proven to be it is a feature of our natural epistemology that abject failures. The hairless ape wears no new even when we accept that the reasons for our clothes. The warts on his naked genitals stare belief are removed, we do not abandon the belief. you in the face. You may continue to laugh it With all due respect to cognitive scientists, their off when earnest little boys point out these discovery seems like a fancy way of describing embarrassing facts. Social convention declares deliberate hallucination. If, as Einstein reckoned, you free to do so and your fragile peace of mind 'insanity is doing the same thing over and over would prefer not to be so rudely disturbed. At again and expecting different results', the inmates the end of the day, however, it may well be the of today's neocolonial reality asylum seem to be case that the last laugh is on you. beholden to a form of collective madness ? as if

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4

BRIEFHISTO RIES:TheBlackPanther Party For Self Defense

By Dubian Ade Centuries of Black liberation struggle in the colonial United Snakes seemed to have come to a head in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement.

But while the movement was able to achieve some victories such as the Civil Rights Bill, it ultimately failed to eliminate white supremacy, poverty, and racial violence. Many previous Civil Rights activists as well as the younger Black generation started to become disillusioned with the movement's insistence on non- violent direct action and its respectability politics. large numbers of Blacks had migrated to the cites after WWII, mostly for industrial jobs. With their influx came a steady emigration of whites out of the urban centers that only accelerated after the Civil Rights movement. As whites fled to the green suburbs most of the jobs went with them, a phenomenon known as "white flight" . Black innercity neighborhoods were left to rot in a starving poverty and police departments were deployed to contain them.

The Black Panther Party For Self- Defense was formed on October 15, 1966 in Oakland, California and came as a direct response to police brutality in the Black community.

Bobby Seal and Huey P. Newton co- founded the Party and together came up with the Ten- Point Platform and Program, a document which outlined the direction of the organization. The Ten- Point Platform and Program included calls for the immediate end to police brutality, an end to economic exploitation, decent housing, education, and full employment of Black people.

Influenced by Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, and Mao Zedong, the Black Panther Party became one of the fist Black organizations to make such demands and championed themselves as the revolutionary vanguard of Black poor and working- class people.

One of the very first programs the Party developed was an armed police watch group: The Panther Patrol. The Panther Patrol would follow and observe police activities within the Black community while remaining within their constitutional rights to do so. Their boldness in the face of the pigs and their astute knowledge of the law impressed local residence and terrified police officers. Very often Panthers would have stare- downs with the police that attracted on- lookers, many of whom had never seen an armed group of Black people successfully challenge police authority. The spectacle was used as an opportunity to recruit members of the Party and conduct political education.

California was an open- carry state at the time, and the Panthers took every opportunity to utilize that fact. Members would walk the streets of Oakland in broad day- light with guns by their side. It seemed every time the Panthers made a local appearance they carried their weapons so that they were visible. Very quickly the Panthers began making a name for themselves in the community. At one point the Party even acted a security escort for Betty Shabazz.

When the move was made to eliminate California's open- carry status, the Black Panther Party marched onto the state capitol fully armed. On May 2, 1967 a group of thirty Panthers led by Bobby Seal crashed the state Assembly as the legislator was scheduled to vote on the Mulford Act which would strike down open- carry. Panthers entered the capitol and Seal read aloud a formal statement before he and the group were arrested. The incident gained national headlines and inspired the formation of chapters across the country.

The Party would soon multiply their message through the formation of their own newspaper The Black Panther. First released in April 1967, the newspaper became the national voice of the Party and generated much needed revenue. Used as an engine for broadcasting its revolutionary ideas, the newspaper helped the Panthers gain national popularity and by 1970 there were BPP chapters in over 68 cities.

One of the most important programs to have come out of The Black Panther Party

was the BPP survival programs. The Free Breakfast For Children program in particular provided food to at least 10,000 children a day. Through the program the Panthers were able to sustain community support, conduct political education, and expose the failure of social programs initiated by the government. The Free Breakfast Program allowed the Party to have a foothold in the Black community where they could organize the people on a effective level.

As early as 1967 the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover was conducting COINTELPRO operations to eliminate the Party. The brutal assignations of Bobby Hutton and Fred Hampton were crushing blows to the Party and proved the lengths to which the FBI would go in order to destroy to Party. These tactics also included jailing BBP leaders on fabricated charges. Huey P. Newton was jailed for an extended period of time for a murder he did not commit. Bobby Seal was jailed on trumped up charges and gaged during his court hearing. Assata Shakur was charged and thrown in jail for a murder she did not commit. The FBI would fabricate charges, manipulated witness, manufacture evidence, anything to lock away members of the Party.

All of the money involved in the judicial process became a huge burden for the Party financially. BPP hired lawyers and raised bail money for members.

But the attacks were so frequent that it was beyond the Party's capacity. A substantial part of BPP's energies were focused on getting its members out of jail and this took away from the work it was able to do on the ground.

COINTELPRO had informants infiltrate all levels of Panther leadership. The FBI would often follow and physiologically harass members of the Party, tap their phones, and bug their homes. Many members were force to stop their involvement with the Party and go underground. The FBI used its surveillance technologies to aggravate and escalate conflicts between BPP leadership.

The fateful split between Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver marked the beginning of the end for the Party. The egoism greatly divided the membership to the point of no recovery. With Cleaver exiled to Algeria, and most of the leadership dead or in prison, the Party eventually declined.

A number of revolutionary figures came out of the Party including Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver, Elaine Brown, George Jackson, and Fred Hampton. For a brief time Stokley Carmichael was also affiliated with the Party. The contribution it has made to the Black liberation movement is unparalleled. Happy 50th BPP.

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DecolonizingVoices The Heroine Austin McCaffrey

When shall the life grow into safety, When shall our time grow into maturity? as we have attempted to, ourselves?

I glean so little of the answer, but I shan?t dare plea, I am looking to my heroine to teach me.

Like a bird out of its shell, finally, the feeding time you?ll be at last, at long last the era is carving its way out of me, she?s passionate gray and she slits my wrist (how cliche) how closed it has been and a music box now it?s finally open the bathtub is a meadow which dreams of being wonderlands multiple with insects the color of grease subtly beeping and confetti of grass turned so far yellow it is alive again in another, magickish plain sifting through the vacant window screen an infant breastfeeding its mother ?I?m warm and safe again? and you?re touching me from the inside with fingers behind a softish wall, I?m aroused in the fourth person now.

I?m aroused in the fourth person now.

And you can count my fingers without a decimal system now, and you can speak of painless freedom by crying my name now, and you can cry my name instead of some wilting tears now, and you can dig into the mulchy loam and find a dimension without time now

We implicit climb a lake like a hilltop now, Our reflections shimmer like steeples In the tilting mist, rolling like pigs, now Whose senses have been injected into mystery veins, by steeples, growing in their plethoras from the horizon?s gospel oil rig I?m aroused in the fourth person now, and you?re touching me with hair that isn?t dead body now, and you?re growing pubic out my teeth with tastebuds warmth of fur now, and you?re an epidural of mace selecting my front as a numb bundle, like a cornfield burning in the presence of lambsblood now, and you?re sacrificing me into the resting church organs of migrating fish now,

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with two rivers intersecting in the well-treated bliss now, you passionate and gray and slit-tit my wrist bits like chalk split urethras now, come out of me the inception of a surreptitious pagan spring, now? one that has hid under poisonous mushroom caps, whilst it shriek, one shriek sitting on delay, reverberating lavishly as if the atmosphere were a tight room packed of jagged objects, then, but? now is the now times graces flying in a perfect circle, now Friends mailed me a mark that scrawled ?heaven is her womb? then but they?re throwing up in animal-stained toilet stalls, now cunt-ass cannot bless me lest it miscue what I?m discus in the bloom gusts, now, Friends catcall ?you?s the heaven gag, take a look into my plastic bag,? ?Faith babe? then Now the plastic sets itself down wanton star atop the Christmas tree of landfill, now and she, she washes her illiterate gown with city ocean water built of my fronds, now sparkle horizon where her collarbone creates the waking shoulder-blade, now she bathes in my skin folds, twice as naked as the naked body, now she skinny-dips in bone drippings and bubble blows my broth, now we kiss the gender-tipped divine spire tilting it from perch, now and cast it falling to earth taller than the tallest birch, now we call it ?grow, grow like a sapling? but the sapling?s bled, now we gave it leech instead of peach and tapped it sapless dead, now We write in the fourth person and cough up snot on scriptures till the seasons cannot read them We swallow nothing when we?re gagging on limp dicks but we keep what they expel in jars and save it for the densest stars when they go out to town, now Involuntary everything, she?s kept atop a mausoleum home so she can comfort we We are not made of sacrifice, we are not made of loving We are buried without tailbones and we will not shine to heaven We will not trim our minds of streamers and we will not age to ashes Our eyelashes have literary structure; without saying so, you will sense us census when you kill your body senseless when you?re posed, a silhouette on the slanted roof who watches the radio towers strip the fog away during the sunset that the sun sets after the sunset

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Dearest darthings we are pardoning the flaws of hidden sunsets Draining masses of their fervor with their hiddenness abundant, She and I/ We

deliver me?

Believe me?

I want to be as queerish as clear as Genesis

You are claws within me, monument She are taut when skin me, monument Cry no crime, but sin free, monument You?re a genderless woman and you stand with hatred Heroine from beyond the reach of branches Experience from avast the race of planes In your hand you finger a foot, then upside-down, maps of mundane urge rushing to his head, you hang your prey who looks like a pastor that loved me before I was born into tides.

before

Woe is he

Accurst this distortion said me into a face of distinction

Woe is we But woe to wonder When, she to she Deliver me.

Sit on my face and pillows draw me in, like murder in the movies Sell me indulgences nasty as taking a clean shower with a modest courtesan of every gender She feeds me fusty bread fashioned of my painted fingernails She delivers me Deliver me?

the fall

I say, in the simple past I was autumnal and dreary What lit me in brush fire tempted me into this fustian of brusque societies this taunt of center-splitting maturity

In betterness I am simple she now and we are sacrilege for ourselves and you dare question me: ?Where is the fag-god princess whose glee is prim and pretty whose pee you drink on sundays when the wine is wormwood??

If I can bear to translate, Where is my monument, now, You ask?

Monument where, stain upon the heart declares?

My monument to grace she is a queen of liberty and she is a genderless woman with her hair wrapped in a bluster, her stone eyes launch knowing into outtro the inferno, she is not topless virginal she is the tip of the mausoleum

de

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My curt spirit is hers to keep, now We wet our lips with the industry that bleeds, now I want to be as queerish as JesusThomas me, now And my monument to grace Is the tip of the mausoleum.

She will lead me into freedom

Now A tulip Under a Passing Train I cannot tell where my legs are now The sky is napping in the key of young life ending A hooded woman is thrusting in and outtro my asshole with something that makes me feel cold and dancing

And I shall ne?er return until my heroine calls me home She will be a decay body lying in the sand of a gone tree I will lap her grains into my cavity From my soft inside she will eat me quite alive And you will not see me no more, now, You will only see my voice painted on the untimely graves Of the youthful blood that poured into earth before it knew life Could be a safe

I am being gathered on a harp glissando into a white light reclining above the city skyline

place.

I?m leaving the hometown graveyard as a love screaming ghost

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Tombaby Wrapped in Bl anket St at ement

By Koby Omansky

?Hurt?

As a verb, noun, adjective, sacrifice to the greater god of grammar subject to the same debate as dresses: made to fit us or made us to fit them?

The gendering of cloth and letter.

Quilts stitched by matriarchs to swaddle patriarchs stitching up words to stitch matriarchs to quilting, When I am pinkened and tight-sheathed in clothes that love me soft, girl, bendy, current-There is watch, watching, watched.

And then, the sequel: loose-limbed In boy shirt pant, thumb in a loop, Cocked-out foot. Men will drink from The honey of girl or the nectar of boy, us, the flower of permittance, them, hummingbirds that have wars.

The bellybutton, having fed, the breast, to feed, the ass, fed on. Bear me son.

Bear me daughter who looks nothing like you, sidewalk girl. From whose fountain we have sprung, they remind us: drink up, baby, there?s so much more where it came from.

The few ways to fend. That hurt, wearing, Juice of the slipping, sewing by streetlight, eaten, eating, having eaten, show it! the embroidered rose, lit up from within the burning place called out in the dark.

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Col onial Conspiracy Theory

By Siddiq Kiaam Kabir Khan "Rich men, trust not in wealth, Gold cannot buy you health; Physic himself must fade. All things to end are made... Haste, therefore, each degree, To welcome destiny..." ? Thomas Nashe, In Time of Plague

??Life after work is still work?, she said' (A Chinese clerk in Zambia) 'Describing the morning commute to work as ?going from a small prison to a large prison?' (some of them half-jokingly described themselves as ?higher-class migrant workers') ?Boredom is always counter-revolutionary? (the colony is a conspiracy to make you bored) ?It is boredom which eventually overtakes a man who seeks for excitement instead of understanding? (the colony is a conspiracy to make you excited) ?climax is catharsis, but such paroxysms often amount to oblivious ways of releasing pent up energies not invested in the real context; since mature communities devote more energy to the real context, there is relatively less need for these release valves. Sometimes climaxes are appropriate (as in sex), but the use of such gushes of feeling in Western movies, music, and literature, stands out as strange: they often have nothing whatsoever to do with the real context?

(Images of sex sell even sexless aspects of the colony.

Even sexless images that promise sex sell submission to the colony as a whole.

The colony is a conspiracy to make you happy.

The colony is a conspiracy to make you miserable.

The colony is a conspiracy to make you feel happy under miserable conditions by making you feel misery is sexy [?one must suffer for beauty?].

The colony is a conspiracy to make you horny.) ?Both men are in search of intense feeling; neither is in search of just feeling, of feeling properly motivated? (the colony is a conspiracy to make you feel excited about precisely nothing: the socially enforced nullity of the daily grind, the consumption of whose products is as alienated, debilitating, useless and stupid as the drudgery that precedes it ['They relish the convenience of company managed systems of collective consumption, and the time and money they save']; the reduction of irretrievable effervescent possibility to a gray commute through dead space and dead time [?No well-intentioned person could journey in an underground tube-train full of wan faces coming in to work in the mornings from the suburbs, reading their Daily Express, or returning from work in the evenings towards the suburbs, reading their Evening Standard, without feeling homicidal?]; a conspiracy to glorify vacuity, justify the unjustifiable for the sake of the powerful, instill a senseless, unnecessary, evil waste of human treasure with an unjustified, immoral sense of necessity and grandeur ['Clearly, someone who cannot verbally express negative emotions will have trouble discharging and neutralizing these emotions, physiologically as well as psychically?]; a conspiracy to implant a false sentiment of excitement

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by way of a false consciousness of reality: [?It is, I think, quite difficult to characterize the pathological normality that prevails in contemporary societies by analogy to recognized medical conditions. In the realm of ?communication?, ordinary life consists of alternating episodes of fixated staring (catatonia) and compulsive babble (logorrhoea or graphorrhea)?]

The colony is a conspiracy to excite your appetite and inhibit your faculty of judgment, ['With almost willful perversity, I am going to Denmark for a week, a country that is often found to be the ?happiest? in the world, which is another way to say its population is the blindest and most conformist of all?]; a conspiracy to denude totally your sense-ability and cripple your moral fibre through aesthetic poverty [?The aesthetic is the opposite of the anaesthetic?], to reduce you to the stature of an emotional pygmy ['there is strong empirical support for alexithymia being a stable personality trait rather than just a consequence of psychological distress?]; a conspiracy to strike blind the poverty-striken to the cheap confines of their common prison and the common wealth that they deny through petty lives frittered away in a sordid frenzy of miserly sensuality with all the paltry passion of a giant circle-jerk ['the statistical paradox of so many future suicidal people declaring that they are quite satisfied with their lot?]; a conspiracy to promote the pursuit by poor people of pure sensation for it?s own sake, as Capital seeks propagation for it?s own sake [?I was completely amazed by the discovery of alexithymia, which, in the light of the knowledge that you have provided, appears to be the link that was, until now, missing in the contemporary exposition of the end of everything?]; the colony is a sensational pean to commodities and their passions [?Cutting cost and production targets

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are subjects of intense and emotional verbal exchange in meetings?], a commercial promotion of improper motivation, an advertisement for insensate ingenuity, a campaign to propagate emotion improperly felt, voracious ferocity devoid of veracious discernment, disguised delirium, inanity publicised as passionate intensity, the systematic estrangement of the senses, a sensibility founded on plastic surgery, virile passion based on sterile delusion, tireless publicity on behalf of secret insanity, hidden intentions in the hearts of men and women [?Let us have madness openly, O men of my generation?] as on the surface of all the earth, [?and within the head, A rotting bog of huge lean graves?]; a hymn in veneration of excrement, human feelings given nourishment through the degradation of human beings [?The inability to express emotions verbally implies a deficient interior life.

Inevitably, those who cannot match feelings to words will live out that deficit in their contacts with others?]; a conspiracy to elevate the sentimental to the level of the pathological [?It is true of course that any work of art that coerces the reader or spectator into intense emotional response for which there is no adequate warrant or motive is by definition sentimental?] a conspiracy to make you feel excited about what would rightly make you feel both disgusted and bored) ?The poem as an exercise in just feeling is an act of moral judgement? (against the poverty of their existence that grinds them down every day of their lives [despite and precisely because of the immense accumulation of spectacles, capital and toys that smothers their world at all levels under vast layers of brilliantly glittering pollution]; against their affluent misery their designer-label ennui, [?the golden chains

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with which the bourgeoisie drags them in its train?]; their plushly-padded prison cells, their decapitated dawns, [?Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering?]; their disastrous acceptance of the blackmail of utility perpetrated by a useless society [?In the geology of lies known as city planning, architecture has as much to do with building places to live well as Coca-Cola has to do with making satisfying drinks?]; their passive consumption of the bourgeois idea of happiness, their pseudo-rebellious ideologies [?This dissatisfaction is familiar to students of romantic literature under the name of ennui?]; against all their own illusions and the conspiracy of duplicity that censors reality through the systematic organisation of false appearances; the poetry of our peers is nothing if not an art tensed to turn everyday life into an exciting game and so justify that feeling of excitement the universal pursuit of which through hopelessly contradictory means has turned everyday life into an asinine bore) ?The face of all the world is changed, I think, Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul Move still, oh, still, beside me, as they stole Betwixt me and the dreadful outer brink?

(The lens of the human eye projects an upside-down picture of the world; the visual cortex of the human brain turns it right-side up again) ?At that moment the animal spirit, that which lives in the high chamber to which all the spirits of the senses carry their perceptions, began to wonder deeply at it, and, speaking especially to the spirit of sight, spoke these words: ?Now your blessedness appears??

(The cochlea of the human ear transmits a complex matrix composed of the interplay between various

36

clusters of sound waves, each with a particular spectrum of frequencies produced from a unique source; the aural center of the brain sorts through all these, muting those which maintain a dull persistent presence over time) ?Destruction was my Beatrice?

(A summary of Godel?s first incompleteness theorem can be stated as: Any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete; if certain basic mathematical proofs exist they can be manipulated to prove the opposite, and there is no logical way to resolve this contradiction; truth is a semantic concept, and is not equivalent to provability except in special cases) ?From then on Eros ruled my soul...

And though her image, which was continually with me, was a device of Eros to govern me, it was nevertheless of so noble a virtue that it never allowed Eros to rule me without the loyal counsel of reason in all those things where such counsel was usefully heard.?

(It is possible to assign a finite value to an infinite series of natural numbers. The most difficult such series, the sum of all integers to infinity and beyond, has successfully been manipulated to produce a simple mathematical formula, counter-intuitive but logically coherent ? ?1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + ... = -1/ 12?) ?

Value, as Marx shows in the opening pages of Capital, forcibly imposes equivalence upon things that are not equivalent. All the contradictions of the commodity, even its eventual crisis, are already contained in the "simple commodity-form," namely, "20 yards of linen = 1 coat". But here we may go even further than Marx and, since the quantity has no significance, reduce the equation to "linen = coat". Linen is thus the same thing as a coat, or tea, or iron. In other words, "white = black". Obviously a society founded on such a principle is bound to come to a bad end?

(There once was a C with a sore; B caused it. C fractured B?s jaw.

Then A took offense, and in B?s defense, reduced C to c with a saw) ?The man stands. He has his legs. He has his feet. He is a man. He was a man. He becomes a tree. He has his arms. He stands because the maiden looks at him with the maiden's eye. The maiden looks, fastening him to the ground. And it is so. His legs are those of a man, but he is a tree. His arms are those of a man?

He is a tree. He has his eyes, because he was a man. He has his head. He has his head-hair. He is a tree which is a man. He is a man. He is a tree. He has his feet. He is shod. He has his nails. He has his mouth.

He has his nose. He has his ears. He is a tree. He is a man? He talks. He is a tree. He was a man who talked, and it is so that he talks while he is a tree. He waits standing on the mountain... He is a talking tree, one that talked standing there, for he was a man. The maiden looked at him, that is why he became a tree. It is true that he talks, for he was a man. And it is true that he became a tree which talked, for he was a tree. He looked and he talked. His mouth remained; his tongue remained to talk with. He is a tree that has his head-hair. He also has his eyes. He looks. He is a tree that looks. He is a tree.?

(Slavery is always inexcusable, but there is some merit in knowing that one is a slave; and the most irreparable vice is [?clear signs of a fundamental delusion: the notion that the masses, proletarians, individuals, or subjects are manipulated, seduced, corrupted, fooled -that they can neither express themselves or act autonomously?]

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to put up with this without knowing it) ?The organisation of words that leads to discourse transforms something in the world's order through an effect on the consciousness of those who express it and those who listen to it.

It is the breach through which a glimpse of eternity rushes into a world rolling darkly towards its ruin.?

(Adieu, farewell, earth?s wordlessness ?

O miserable dumb persistence That markets poverty as bliss ?

Begone! No more mercy on this!) ?The victory will go to those who know how to create disorder without loving it. You'll see that I have no trouble explaining this crucial variation: the lyrical aspiration toward the end of the world and its subsequent retraction, owing to new facts. For example, the mind was threatened back then with coagulation, whereas today it is threatened with dissolution.?

(Silence and psychosis, paralysis and passionlessness, self-deception and cynicism, dissolution and discipline, social amnesia and political schizophrenia, profitable superstition and universal autism, all form an inseparable unity under the domination of unrestrained unconsciousness to which an abject populace is irrationally subjected with predictably disastrous results: thus it is necessary to make the world more rational as a first step to making it more exciting; it is necessary to disillusion desire and emotions as a first step to revolutionising them: Boredom is always counter-disillusionary) ?Happier places have more suicides. Figure 1 provides the first and simplest evidence. It uses raw, unadjusted data on subjective well-being rankings (from the World Values Survey) and suicide rates (from the World Health Organization). Although there are variations around the average (e.g., the Netherlands), the striking association in the scatter plot is the positive association between happiness ranking and suicide rate. This gradient is the opposite of that expected.?

(The explanations offered by every hired expert trained to apply their minds like bullshit on the mud walls of a peasant hut to the primary product of modern civilisation ? self-delusion ? remain as absurd and inane as can be expected) ?Above all he scorned the sentiment which seeks to prolong enjoyment by moderation?

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(thus ?the only man who lived dangerously?, who also famously cast his prognosis about a civilisation founded from time immemorial on the forced labour of the enormous majority compelled to sell the precious and priceless time of their lives to one master or another to prostitute themselves in order to survive to prostrate themselves body and soul before whichever boss is kind enough to exploit them, a civilisation founded on physical and spiritual submission ? whose oldest profession is its only profession ? and the complete separation between headwork and handwork, condemning it as ?an abomination which will be destroyed?by those among its own slaves ?resolved to make their own politics?) ?The evil that one suffers patiently as unavoidable seems intolerable as soon as one has the idea of getting rid of it. Everything abusive that one removes seems to better highlight what remains and renders the feeling bitterer: the evil has decreased, it is true, but the sensitivity to it is more vivid? (meanwhile, back at the mines, a survivor of the Marikana massacre demonstrates the collusion that opposes the eruption of Reason in history: the colony is a conspiracy to rationalise the irrational, the organisation of confusion between reality and representation, a conspiracy always and everywhere enforced at the end of the day by all the co-ordinated savagery of the uniformed thug, the officious murderer, the armed bureaucrat, the decorated torturer, and every other disgusting lackey of authority: the crisis of representation at the mines threatened to make public the conspiracy in such a way as to create the practical conditions for its destruction) ?we all agreed that the workers should go to the employer and represent themselves and not the unions, because they are the very unions who never come back with anything logical, all they ever say is feedback, feedback all year long but they never report anything rational to the workers?

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(Thus, from the start, the workers had the custom and taste for direct democracy, and if their demands weren?t particularly subversive at the beginning, the manner in which they formulated them certainly was.

When the unions, which are schools for inculcating passivity, attempted once again to neutralise the miners?struggle from above, they found themselves confronted with workers who had already been transformed and who had educated themselves in the organisation of their struggles: they met in general assemblies and elected their own delegates and strike committees. The bureaucrats?fear and hatred of this spontaneous movement was reflected in the remarks of NUM president Senzeni Zokwana who refused to attend the mass meeting on Wonderkop hill on the day of the massacre, declaring that those who remained on the hill were not NUM members but criminals -- exactly the same wording used by mine-boss (and former NUM boss) Cyril Ramaphosa to the chief of police immediately before the insecurity forces imposed the boss's orders over the dead bodies of the strikers. This same ideological authoritarianism, which calls free discussion ?criminality? and calls submission to rackets and their owners ?disciplined socialist consciousness,? had already led COSATU secretary-general Zwelinzima Vavi to decry ? regarding an earlier wildcat strike at Impala Platinum that was similarly organised outside and against the unions ? the criminal fact that ?miners are leading themselves?. One knows that this kind of interpretation is generally followed by its demonstration with gunshots, which is what happened not only at the Marikana massacre but before it, when the union fat-cats shot their own members) ?Everything they told us about communism was a lie.

The worst thing is, everything they told us about capitalism was true?

(Popular joke in the former bureaucratic-bloc after the fall of the Berlin wall about the bitter irony they came to see in the propaganda of every Beloved and Respected Comrade Leader) ?But eventually we must concede to our ignorance, and to the manifest presence of the things themselves, their poignant signification of ancient concerns, of loss, of time that passes, of their position at the very beginning of who we have become.?

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Call For Submissions

The Decolonizer is looking for submissions! The subversive content we feature cuts across a variety genres including but not limited to essay, short-story, poetry, news articles, commentaries, reports, plays, excerpts and short fiction. We ask that they be no more than 1000 words although there is room for flexibility. Submissions that do not address race, class, gender, sexuality, or colonization will not be considered.

Please send all submissions to thedecolonizernewsletter@gmail.com or fill out the Submissions form on our website http:/ / www.thedecolonizer.com/ . We will then contact you to move forward with the submissions process.

ThePatheticHillaryClintonbandwagon

By Dubian Ade

Before I begin, here is an illustration of what I actually think of Donald Trump:

Now that we got that out of the way, lets talk about Hillary and the pathetic reactionary robots who support her.

Do you remember you were the same people who were all starry-eyed for Bernie Sanders?

On social media everyone was "feelin the Bern" and sharing photographs of that bird or whatever.

Back then you were suspect number one.

Sanders was basic af and all about white working class settler colonialism and white supremacy.

But you all were feeling the Bern. At the Democratic debates Hillary was like the kid nobody liked in school. People were pulling for Sanders so hard. He was the pinnacle of liberal values.

And now you all are what? Feeling the depression with Hillary? Y'all are supporting Hillary even after Wikileaks released evidence pointing to a rigged DNC process that favored her over Sanders.

With the rise of Trump fascism everyone has now jumped on Hillary Clinton's imperialist, carceral feminist bandwagon. The entire campaign has resorted to fearmongering.

Clinton supporters have literately terned any descent against her into a vote for Trump.

This is despite the fact that while Clinton is accusing Trump of racism on the campaign trail, her foreign policy remains the epitome of white supremacy. In countries where Black and Brown people live Hillary has destroyed lives.

Hillary Clinton is responsible for the 2009 coup in Honduras that removed a democratically elected Manuel Zelaya. Zelaya was ousted because he threated United States imperial and cooperate interests in Honduras. U.S trained Honduran military forces have been assassinating Indigenous activist who dare to challenge U.S. cooperations and the mining activities that are endangering the environment. Most notably the U.S. backed assassination of Indigenous activist Berta Caceres can be directly attributed to Hillary.

Since the 2009 coup, human rights violations in Honduras have soared.

Hillary has also expressed open support for Israel in its systematic annihilation of Palestinians and has repeatedly said "Israel has a right to defend its self".

Hillary actions in Syria are a direct result of her investments in Israel. Using the Syrian civil war as a means to plot against Iran (a long time enemy of Israel), Clinton was directly involved in planing an armed overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, the current president of Syria. Clinton foreign policy in Syria has been to arm anti-Assad Syrians, only furthering the civil war conflict. She has even stood between UN peace negotiations and cease fires, demanding first the removal of Assad. More than 10 million Syrians have been displaced and at least 200,000 people have died.

Did we forget that as early as 2014 Hillary Clinton was all over the country saying "all lives matter"?

During the Bill Clinton administration in the 90s, her and her husband were responsible for the War on Drugs policies that led to the murder and incarceration of thousands of Black and Brown people in the United States. According to Donna Murch state and federal prison numbers increased under Bill Clinton more than any other presidency. Hillary is known to be in the pockets

of the prison lobbyist. Her legacy is directly responsible for the current shape of U.S. policing and mass incarceration.

She has a track-record of anti-Blackness.

Black people: why do you support her?

Hillary had said she was against the ICE raids, yet her entire campaign has hinged on continuing the "legacy" of the Obama administration. She said "families fleeing violence in Central America should be given a full opportunity to seek relief". Of course, she is directly responsible for that violence. Many of the people ICE targeted were Honduran.

Hillary is barely a feminist at all. Her White Supremacist imperial policies destroy the lives of countless women and femmes. She has repeatedly shafted impoverished mothers of color with her welfare reforms. She is even reported to have paid women staffers of the Clinton Foundation 72 cents to every dollar male employees earned.

But even the slightest critique is a threat to the moral investment in Clinton.

People will say: "but would you rather have Trump win? Hillary is the lesser of two evils."

The lesser of two evils? The last time I checked settler colonialism was settler colonialism regardless of who occupies the White House. There are Native protesters being attacked by police, National Guardsmen, and private security firms right now at Standing Rock as this bogus election commences.

Clinton has refused to take a stand on the pipeline. Hillary Clinton is the violence of empire and the people who support her are accessories.

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2

BlackDepressionandHealing

By Chris Garrick

Our lives are drenched in trauma. The trauma of being black, of existing in an anti-black world, the trauma passed on from our ancestors.

We're told depression is a mental illness, that just exists because of imbalances in your brain, but I think a narrative that has been swept under the rug is that depression caused by white supremacy and it's ugly cousins. What about the conditions that have historically exploited and subjugated and erased our bodies?

Would depression still be a thing in black people if the stress caused by poverty and exacerbated by capitalism were to be erased under a different system ? If we didn't have to deal with the forced enslavement of our people who were raped, lynched, mutilated and then disposed of after building this country, would we have to live with depression the way we do now?

At times I see something antiblack or transmisogynistic or even just fucked up and I think to myself this is too much. Like I'm very interested in other narratives that experience something similar because of the dysphoria or just constant weariness and distress that come with the conditions we exist in.

In our reality, if you can't work and produce adequate labor to sustain capitalism than you don't deserve food or shelter or even just the right to life and that's a reality that could very much and probably does depress many people whether they know it or not. What I've been more interested in of late is how to find methods of resistance to be able to keep going in our antiblack queerphobic shit ass world.

I think Solange very much paints a picture in "Cranes in the Sky" that black depression and resistance strategies are things that need to be talked about more, even within activist circles, because we're so consistently burnt out many of us don't even have the headspace to actually organize and fight the conditions plaguing us.

How do we even begin to heal from the damage of the system when white supremacy and white ideology has its dirty hands in literally everything we're forced to exist in? When the state has a hand in every part of your being how can we effectively heal ourselves enough to begin to face the state head on in order to deconstruct it?

It is just the parasitic nature of nation states and white ideology, which do so much violence and damage to us and exploit us to a point where we don't have the energy or collective mobilization to actively work towards organizing against the state.

What effectively has to happen is us as a collective need to start really loving and supporting each other in new radical ways and hold more space for community healing. Because we're stronger when we're together and we're stronger when we are healthy. The key to resisting the violence the state throws at us is love, whatever that may look like.

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W hoW ill SurviveAmerica?

ReneeDavis Renee Davis was a 23-year-old cis Native woman who was shot and killed by police on October 21, 2016 on Muckleshoot tribal lands in Washington. Davis was five months pregnant had three children and was struggling with depression. Davis called a friend to say that she was in distress and the friend called the police. King County Sheriff deputies visited Davis at her home for a wellness check. They knocked on the door and reportedly heard children playing inside but there was no answer. The officers forced their way inside where they allegedly encountered Davis with a handgun. Officers opened fire onto Davis. Her children were not harmed during the shooting.

DeborahDanner Deborah Danner was a 66-year-old cis Black woman who was shot and killed by police on October 18, 2016 in The Bronx, NY. Danner had suffered from schizophrenia and the police department was fully aware of her condition. When a neighbor called 911 to report a disturbance in Danner's apartment, it was not the first time a resident had done so. Police arrived at the apartment and forcefully entered when no one answered. Officer Hugh Barry came into Danner's bedroom, where Danner was naked and allegedly holding a pair of scissors. Danner allegedly reached for a baseball bat and charged at the officer, who opened fire.

JuliaMartin Julia Martin was a 27-year-old cis Black woman who was killed on October 7, 2016 in Chicago, IL. Martin had recently broken up with her long-time partner and wanted to return an engagement ring. 35-year-old Rodney Harvey came to Martins apartment to return the ring. Upon arrival Harvey broke inside of the apartment and stabbed Martin multiple times before jumping to his own death from her apartment window.

JazzAlford Jazz Alford was a 30-year-old trans Black woman who was killed on September 23, 2016 in Birmingham, AL. Alford's body was found in her room at the Kings Inn and was pronounced dead at the scene. She was widely misgendered by news media outlets even though investigators knew that she was a transgender woman and failed to release those details. She is the 22nd reported trans person killed this year.

BrandiBledsoe Brandi Bledsoe was a 32-year-old trans black woman who was found dead on October 8, 2016 in Cleavland, Ohio. She was found in the back of a house with plastic bags on her head and hands. Medical examiners determined the cause of death was a gun shoot wound to the chest. She has been consistently mis-gendered by news media outlets. She is the 23rd reported trans person to be killed this year.

Rest InPower

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TRACKTHE MO VEMENT O ctober,2016 # NoDAP

# PrisonStrike

Repression has escalated at Standing Rock as the colonial policing units heighten their efforts to arrest protesters. On the weekend of October 22nd at least 126 protesters were arrested by riot police in armored vehicles and helicopters. On October 28 riot police arrested another 141 people as they prepared to set up a new camp. Police have been using tear gas, sound grenades, rubber bullets, and live ammunition to remove water defenders from land protected by treaty. Water defenders have continued to stand their ground against the colonizers.

Prison inmates are continuing strikes and work stoppages to protest mass incarceration across the United States. A inmate at Limestone Correctional Facility in Alabama has began a hunger strike to protest the Alabama Department of Corrections. Many other inmates have also began hunger strikes. The nation wide strike which began on September 9th has become the largest prison protests in modern history. At least 20,000 inmates are still participating in the strike.

# FeesMustFall

# SouthKorea

On October 10th #FeesMustFall protesters came up against police repression in South Africa as they staged an action at Witwatersrand University demanding free, decolonized education. Police unleashed water cannons, rubber bullets, and tear gas onto student protesters. Unrest has revitalized the #FeesMustFall movement after President Zuma reneged on the promise to lower fees and the Minister of Higher Education Blade Nzimande recommended fee increases in August.

Solidarity marches in New York City have bee organized to bring awareness of the #FeesMustFall movement.

Thousands of protesters in South Korea took to the streets on October 29th in opposition to South Korean President Park Geun- hye. Geun- hye is charged with leaking official state documents to a friend. In response Park has ordered the resignation of ten of her senior secretaries and admitted to leaking the documents. A through investigation of her cabinet members is currently under way. At least 8,ooo protesters participated in the action.

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Special thankstoour contributing writers Taylar Nuevelle

Saddiq Kiaam Kabir Khan

Christopher Garrick

Austin McCaffrey

Sispho Mbuli Koby Omansky Dubian Ade

THE DECOLONIZER gives a special thanks to @DecolonizingMedia for their continued coverage on issues regarding # indigenousliberation and for their righteous use of images. Their work continues to influence THE DECOLONIZER. Check out their work at http:/ / decolonizingmedia.tumblr.com/

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