If the Left Doesn’t Critique Endless War, Who Will?
“We must raise the issues of war and imperialism in electoral politics in this country,” even if the Democrats don’t, said BAR senior columnist Margaret Kimberley, speaking at the annual conference of UNAC, the United National Anti-War Coalition. “In the debates, foreign policy is discussed very little, and when it is they all sound the same, even those who are supposed to be progressive,” said Kimberley.
“Respectable” Black Women Fought Mass Incarceration
Back in the days when 90 percent of southern prison inmates were Black, socially conservative Black clubwomen fought for prison reform, believing that “putting Black women in jail was hurting the Black community,” said Nikki Brown, professor of history at the University of New Orleans. The National Association of Colored Women, who practiced what we today call “respectability” politics, played a key role in creating alternatives to incarceration, said Brown, who authored an article titled, “Keeping Black Motherhood Out of Prison: Prison Reform and Woman-Saving in the Progressive Era.”
Last Surviving Member of the Move 9 is Released
Delbert Africa, imprisoned along with eight other members of the Move organization in 1978 in the death of a Philadelphia policeman, is finally free to “tell his story,” said Mumia Abu Jamal, the nation’s best known political prisoner, who was convicted in the death of another Philadelphia cop in 1981. Abu Jamal recounted how a Black city councilman described Delbert Africa as “one of the greatest Black men that ever lived.” Two Move members died mysteriously in prison.
Black Scholar Praises Heroes and Indicts “Scoundrels” of McCarthy Era
The peace activists that were persecuted in the McCarthy era were not fighting just for the absence of war, but were “anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist and demanded an end to United States policing of the world,” said Charisse Burden-Stelly, professor of Africana Studies and political science at Carleton College. The exemplars of this struggle were W.E.B. Dubois, Paul Robeson and Claudia Jones, “Peace was construed as a Soviet ploy to undermine the American way of life,” said Burden-Stelly. Sound familiar?
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The U.S. extradition request for Fergie Chambers is an attempt to use Spanish courts to extend a domestic repression campaign against political opposition.
The demand to call out alleged crimes in Iran or Cuba while those countries face annihilation from the U.S. and Israel is a refusal to see those people as human beings worthy of protection.
Red Scares are a recurring feature of the U.S. political tradition aimed at criminalizing anticapitalist politics through accusations of foreign infiltration and conspiracy. The NSPM-7 and the report…
For several years, three landlocked West African states have undergone political transformations designed to turn the page on French neo-colonialism.
The U.S. is considering drone strikes and sanctions against the Alliance of Sahel States under the guise of counterterrorism, but the real objective is to regain neo-colonial control over African…
