Editor’s note: Reprinted below is a Call by the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations for a national rally and march on the White House in Washington, DC, scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, November 1 and 2, 2014.
The Call was introduced as a resolution by Black is Back Coalition Chairman, Omali Yeshitela and adopted by unanimous vote at the 5th Annual Conference of the Coalition held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on August 16 and 17.
The Call is intended to unite the Black is Back Coalition and the people around the slogan and theme of the November march and rally which is “Peace through Revolution.”
Primary presenters at the Coalition’s Annual Conference were Chairman Omali Yeshitela, Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report, Chairman Lawrence Hamm of the New Jersey-based People’s Organization for Progress, Kamm Howard of N’COBRA and Pam Africa of MOVE and Friends and Family of Mumia Abu Jamal.
The history of U.S. and European white power is a history of war and violence inflicted upon the peoples of the world. It is a history of land theft and slavery that gave rise to the dominant world capitalist economy.
It is a history of the attack on Africa that led to the enslavement of an entire continent and its inhabitants, many of whom were forcibly dispersed throughout the world to work like beasts to create white wealth.
It is a history of the invasion, attack and occupation of the lands now called the Americas, resulting in the annihilation of whole populations whose survivors have been forced to endure conditions of extreme poverty and brutality.
While the various European states attempt to distinguish themselves from each other, Europe achieved its core identity in modern history through its multi-lingual, multi-ethnic unity based on enslaving and colonizing much of the world, the process that gave birth to capitalism and white power on a global scale.
Under this parasitic system half the people of Africa must eke out an existence on one U.S dollar a day so that Europe and North America can enjoy the highest standard of living on the planet.
Of the seven billion human beings on the planet 80 percent are forced to survive on less than 10 dollars a day while fully half are left to subsist on only two and a half dollars daily because the value of our resources and labor are stolen from us.
In the face of more than 500 years of brutality, repression and enslavement the majority of humanity has risen up in fierce resistance to the imperialist peace that has determined that we starve and suffer that that Europe and North America can thrive.
After all is said and done, after all the diversionary tales of African, Islamic and bedraggled terrorists threatening U.S. -made and supplied Apache helicopters, missile-laden drones and F-16 fighter jets, originating in lands hosting the majority of the world’s nuclear weapons, the truth remains that people want social justice, peace and reparations.
It is those weapons of mass destruction in the possession of U.S. and European white power that stand between the people and our aspirations for happiness and the return of our stolen wealth.
The resistance of the oppressed of the Earth is the real basis of this era of permanent imperialist warfare.
It is not sufficient to cry and pray for peace.
The answer is not peace that can be achieved by a cessation of struggle by the oppressed.
The answer is social justice and reparations, which can only be achieved by resistance to oppression and winning power to the people.
Those who are genuinely concerned with peace must fight for it. A real desire for peace is a desire for social justice and reparations.
Those who want peace must take a genuine stance for social justice. We must distinguish ourselves from those who would settle for an imperialist peace that does nothing but protect the status quo.
Let us say what we know to be the truth: the only real peace is peace through revolution!
This is not to say that all the conditions have ripened for revolution.
This is not a call for revolution on this day or at this moment.
It is a demand that we advance to contend with those who would have us accept an imperialist peace that keeps us forever oppressed and exploited.
The demand for “Peace through Revolution” arms African, Indigenous and oppressed peoples everywhere with the understanding that we cannot continue to struggle against an imperialist policy of conducting a specific war as a substitute for struggling to overturn the system of imperialism that can only continue to exist by sucking the blood of the oppressed.
On November 1st and 2nd the Black is Back Coalition for Peace and Social Justice is calling on everyone to come out for our annual rally and march on the White House and join with us in the call for Peace through Revolution!
This is the only realistic response to the Zionist mass murder of nearly two thousand Palestinians in the tiny Gaza portion of their occupied land by white nationalist Israeli thugs.
We recognize that Zionism is only one of the various white nationalist imperialist schemes of land theft, this time under a religious banner that meets the strategic geopolitical aims of international white power.
We support the just struggle of the Palestinian people for repossession of their land, their sovereignty and their dignity from an illegitimate white nationalist settler colonial state that has been imposed on them by force of arms.
We deplore the decimation of much of Iraq and the murder of many of its inhabitants by U.S. -led war. We are not confused by the newly contrived schemes of the U.S. to justify escalation of the war against the Iraqi people with the specter of a new terrorist threat from which the people can only be protected by U.S. troops, bombs and warplanes.
The French must be pushed out of Mali and the Central African Republic and all of Africa must be made free of U.S. and imperialist white power machinations and murder.
AFRICOM must go and all the neocolonial stooges of Africa must be exposed for their surrender of Africa’s resources and future to past and present capitalist parasites that divert the food, clothing, shelter and infrastructure of Africa into the bank accounts, stock markets, streets and super markets of our exploiters.
Today the victims of imperialist-created white power are also demanding social justice, peace and reparations within the citadels of white power – in Belgium, France, Holland, Sweden, France, Germany, Norway and the United Kingdom.
The concentration camps within the U.S. – the reservations, housing projects and colonial Barrios – are teeming with oppressed colonial subjects whose growing political consciousness mocks America’s self-definition as the “Shining City on the Hill.”
Recent examples of the military occupation of the small, majority African town of Ferguson, Missouri following the police assassination of a young African man there, helps the world to know that the colonial occupation of an African community in the U.S. is not essentially different from the colonial military occupation of any people in the world.
All of these struggles – in Occupied Palestine and the Middle East, in Africa, the U.S. and the rest of the world – are the basis of the unending imperialist wars and threats of wars.
They are struggles that expose to the marrow the fact that our oppression and exploitation is a condition for the success of the imperialist project.
They are the clearest examples that the only certain peace for the peoples of the world is Peace through Revolution!
Forward to Washington, DC, November 1 and 2, 2014!
