The latest issue of "Turning the Tide" will be back from the printer in the morning, and we'll be working on mailing over 1500 copies to prisoners around CA and the US. Come join at the Peace Center, 8124 W. Third St., near Crescent Heights Tuesday from 10:00 AM until well into the evening, and we may be back on Wednesday if necessary (it's a big mailing).
Here's the editorial from the current issue: PARTs Perspective: The French Have a Word For It: Plus Royaliste Que Le Roi by Michael Novick, Anti-Racist Action-Los Angeles, People Against Racist Terror (ARA-LA/PART) More monarchist than the monarch. This French proverb expresses the irrationality of a subject so loyal to a ruler, or a principle, that his zeal to uphold or defend it exceeds that of the ruler who stands to benefit the most. In the alternate form, Plus Catholique que le Pape, more Catholic than the Pope, it tends to be used to express a criticism of hypocritical and pretentious false piety. In either form, and with both nuances of meaning, it well applies to the shepherded public opinion in the U.S., which the evidence of our senses now clearly demonstrates is more Euro-centric than the Europeans and more Zionist than the Israelis. While Greek, French, British and Spanish youth, migrants and working people are smashing massively in the streets against austerity, US workers and students seem content to devote ourselves to rebuilding the dream. In Israel, settler-colonial Israeli Jews march by hundreds of thousands in their capital, Tel Aviv, even if its only to complain about the neo-liberal domestic economic policies of their government. But here in the US, any inkling of deviance from 100% pro-Israel politics is enough to get the former Democratic Mayor of New York to endorse the Republican in a special Congressional election. The world is in flames across Africa, Asia, and Europe, throughout Latin America, even in the US Caribbean colony of Puerto Rico, yet here things can hardly be said to be smoldering. A single spark can start a prairie fire, but sparks will not catch if the tinder is wet. Identification with the Empire and the oppressor throttles revolutionary class consciousness and independence among the oppressed and exploited. It promotes class collaboration, neo-colonialism, a defense of privilege or victimhood. Labor and the left made much of the outpouring of protest in Madison, WI, and still speak of it as the equivalent of Tahrir Square in Cairo. Yet public workers and their supporters were quickly diverted into putting their energy into elections that ended up maintaining the status quo in the legislature and the courts. The Democrats they backed even stepped away from support of collective bargaining rights as a campaign issue, as minimal a demand as that was. Rallies that supported the Madison WI protesters raised no demands about ending the US wars around the globe, or the war on the poor, youth of color, or migrants inside the US. Meanwhile, organized labor and most of the left ignored the strikes that were a beacon of inspiration inside this country. The AFL-CIO had nothing to say about the prisoners work strike in Georgia, or the hunger strike initiated by the Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit prisoners, that spread to thousands of prisoners around CA and across the U.S. Instead, organized labor and the Dems they back hitch their wagon to uniformed public workers like the cops and prison guards. So it should be no surprise that workers and the so-called middle class vote against their own interests, whether theyre voting for Democrats or Republicans. Neither party represents the true interests of colonized or exploited people and never will. The French also say, Plus ça change, plus cest la même chose the more things change, the more they are the same thing. The morphing of Dubya into Obama has brought change, indeed: more deportations, more surveillance, more war, more transfer of wealth to the wealthiest, more privatization of schools, prisons, and even covert operations, more austerity in the name of stimulus, more capability to invade Africa. But we cannot descend into despair. What will make a real change? It must come, and in fact is coming, from below and from outside the corporate dominated political system. Alliance building and solidarity among the colonized, the wretched of the earth. Honest and sincere folk from other classes and sectors, such as those protesting in DC on the 10th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan or against the Tar Sands pipeline, would do well to heed the lesson that Martin Luther King Jr. taught more than 40 years ago. He said, unless we make fundamental changes in this system, a revolution of values he called it, we will be forming clergy and laity concerned about wars into the indefinite future. Like Malcolm X before him, King began to develop an internationalist, anti-imperialist class consciousness that grew out of the centrality of the Black freedom struggle. Both understood the need for loving self-criticism as well as uncompromising direct action and challenge to white supremacy. King spent the last year of his life, from his speech opposing US aggression in Viet Nam to his death in Memphis while mobilizing to support the sanitation workers, building for a Poor Peoples March on Washington, working with Black, Native, Mexicano, Asian and white poor people. Now, as then, it is the anti-colonial, anti-capitalist struggles of the indigenous, the Africans and Asians, that will help dry out the damp tinder and stoke the fires of revolutionary anti-imperialist class consciousness and push us all forward. This editorial appears in the Oct-Dec. 2011 issue of Turning the Tide: Journal of Anti-Racist Action, Research & Education, Volume 24 Number 4. Sample copies of the entire issue are available from ARA-LA/PART, PO Box 1055, Culver City CA 90232. Subscriptions are $16 a year, payable to Anti-Racist Action at that address. 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