Author
Ytzhak
These words, coming in the shadow of the vast governmental malfeasance
and indeed, betrayals that lay at the heart of Hurricane Katrina, where
people, predominantly Black people, were left to drown and starve by the
tens of thousands, show that the space between hypothetical and real, is
thin indeed....There is, in American political life, a deep, abiding spirit of fascism, formed around the kernel of White Supremacy. It made the unspoken holocaust of so-called Indians possible, which in turn led to a new holocaust against Africa.
'HYPOTHETICAL' HOLOCAUSTS?
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[Col. Writ. 10/1/05] Copyright '05 Mumia Abu-Jamal
http://www.prisonradio.org/audio/mumia/2005maj/OCTo5/MAJB10-2-05Bennett…
The words of conservative pundit, and former Reagan-era Education
Secretary, Bill Bennett, that the nation's crime problem could be 'solved'
"if all Black babies were aborted", is the echo in the hearts of White
America, voiced by a man who has made his post-government career as a
'moralist.'
Already, so-called Black conservatives are marched out to defend their
colleague's words, with some saying it is a mere 'hypothetical'; an
'intellectual mind-game', according to one Negro neocon.
These words, coming in the shadow of the vast governmental malfeasance
and indeed, betrayals that lay at the heart of Hurricane Katrina, where
people, predominantly Black people, were left to drown and starve by the
tens of thousands, show that the space between hypothetical and real, is
thin indeed.
While the rapper, Kanye West, is condemned by the white nationalist,
corporate media, for daring to say that President Bush 'doesn't care about
Black people", Bennett's far more pernicious comments, which call for a kind
of 'compassionate mass killing', are defended by Republicans, ignored by
most white Democrats, and blithely pooh-poohed by the White House.
As for the corporate media, once again, in the rush to be first, it sent
out hours of reports that were based on rumors and lies, lies spun by police
and politicians, while cops staged looting parties, if they stayed in New
Orleans at all! Reports of mass rapes, and mounds of murder victims at the
Superdome and the Convention Center, dutifully transmitted to millions of
viewers, listeners, and readers, fed into the fears of a nation already
preconditioned to dread and fear Black people, and the spectre of Black
crime. Such lies, such racist imagery, allowed nearby communities to,
literally, close their borders to Blacks trying to escape the rising waters,
at gunpoint. Cops in Gretna, Louisiana, charged Black men, women and
children, trying to cross the bridge out of the sunken city, firing at them.
They later took their little food and water!
The media, even in times of disaster, has to be more than a megaphone
for the powerful. Why didn't they talk to the people? Those who knew,
first-hand, what happened, and didn't happen in the Superdome and the
Convention Center?
They chose to go to the uniforms, and those with titles, and spread
poison that caused more damage to the poor, and powerless of the sunken
city.
It is not surprising that Bennett's words come, mere weeks after
Katrina. Was he not part of the first American presidency that went to shed
tears at a Nazi cemetery, in Bitburg, Germany?
There is not a holocaust in human history that didn't begin with
'hypothetical', or 'intellectual mind-games.'
Indeed, when Turkey was busy massacring the Armenians, US High
Commissioner to Turkey, Admiral Mark Bristol, a notorious bigot, was
performing a 'mind-game' that would soon mean peril for Jews in Europe.
Bristol wrote, "The Armenians are a race like the Jews - they have little or
no national spirit and poor moral character."*
And who can forget Hitler's infamous speech, in 1939, when he ominously
asked, "Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?"
The 'mind-games' of intellectuals have real world affects.
There is, in American political life, a deep, abiding spirit of fascism,
formed around the kernel of White Supremacy. It made the unspoken holocaust
of so-called Indians possible, which in turn led to a new holocaust against
Africa.
That is the mother's milk of the nation, and still governs popular and
political thought.
We saw its face in government neglect in Katrina.
Bill Bennett, the nation's moralist, is its voice.
Copyright 2005 Mumia Abu-Jamal
* [*Source*: Christopher Simpson, *The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and
Genocide in the Twentieth Century* (Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press,
1995), pp. 33, 76.]
[Check out Mumia's latest: *WE WANT FREEDOM:
A Life in the Black Panther Party*, from South End Press
(http://www.southendpress.org); Ph.
#1-800-533-8478.]
download mp3:
http://www.prisonradio.org/audio/mumia/2005maj/OCTo5/MAJB10-2-05Bennett…
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