Re: Israel pushing for Kurdish state? -

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In a message dated 7/29/2004 8:49:16 AM Central Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:   >how can you say that the original _expression_ of the local population is irrelevant today? if it is true that the kashmiri people wish to be rid of indian oppression, and we are afraid that the result will be a US protectorate, then our duty is not to deny the former, but to fight the latter, isn't it?<   --ravi   Comment   The national factor is a tricky question . . .  most certainly attempting to assert what the oppressed want. The bottom line is that the oppressed do not want to be oppressed . . . and how this is articulated as politics and ideology depends on the organizations doing the articulation. In respects to the African American people . . . and not simply any black group of people in America . . . the Nation of Islam cannot be ignored.   Although I personal understand the national factor in relations to African Americans different from the fluctuating and changing policy of the Nation of Islam . . . I find nothing offense in their official Theology and their prophecy of the Original Black Man . . . once one reduce this theology to its basic logic structure.   After all the most modern evidence I am aware of tracing mankinds origin on earth back to Mother Africa and the women called "Eve."   Affirmative action programs do not and cannot solve the fundamental problem of a historically forced and institutionalized social position of the African American people as a people. When one even mentions the shattering and break up of the US multinational state many so-called progressives, revolutionaries and even Marxists become eerily quiet. The self determination program up to and including the formation of an independent state is evidently reserved for "genuine movements of the oppressed" outside the boundary of our own bourgeoisie.   I have never advocated a program of integration because the African American people have always been integrated into American society at the bottom. Desegregation and so-called integration are radically different political constructs.   African Americans were owned by the whites - North and South, and no issue in our country is as emotionally charged as the so-called "Negro Question." The socialists and many communist do not even know how to approach the question and apparently wish it would just go away. Well, 40 million people cannot "just go away."   Nor . . . can they be placed on "reservations."   The physical mass of the African American people means their social position can only be maintained through state coercion and heavy does of violence and incarceration . . . that, since their formation as a people makes Stalin's policy on the national factor seem like a Saturday night basement party.   The location of the African American at the heart of the American proletariat and their physical mass . . . as well as dispersal throughout the country makes for an interesting National Factor. The national factor everywhere on earth deals with economic centers of gravity.   Now the Mexican nationals that flow back and forth across the Mexican/US border . . . and the Mexican national minority that resides in the American Union . . . and the Chicano and/or children of Atzlan are in their mass - density, located throughout the Southwest that gravitates economically and socially to Mexico because this area was part of Mexico. Regional autonomy is the obvious short term solution from the standpoint of the communists of the North of the American Union.   Even the term American Union is avoided like the plague by virtually all the so called revolutionaries and progressives in the American Union. The African American people as a historically evolved people . . . THAT ARE NOT Anglo Americans . . . according to how every ANGLO AMERICAN writer and political figure in the history of American has defined Anglo-Americans as a collection of peoples . . . simmering in the "melting pot" . . . are not a nation . . . but rather a historically evolved people.   What ever the economic, social, political, cultural and psychological reasons that the Anglo American people define themselves as different or NOT AFRICAN AMERICAN . . . is the meaning of the national character of the Anglo-American people as a people. The reason Mark Twain or Michael Moore or Bill Clinton or George Bush are not self defined as African American ... establishes the national character of the African American people.   I do not believe it is wish or serious thinking to separate historically evolved people on the basis of that which makes them different and define themselves as different in relationship to one another . . . on the basis of that which defines them as different. Difference or that by which people define themselves as different . . . especially as understood by the ruling or oppressor people and the striving of the oppressed not to be oppressed is not the internal meaning of "national movement" or national factor as some automatic demand for self determination up to and including formation of an independent state.   African American liberation and social revolution does not reduce itself to a demand for self determination . . . up to and including the formation of an independent state because liberation is "from something." What are the African American people as a people striving to be liberated from in the first place if not the bourgeois property relations that locks them into a historically defined social position . . . that is intractable?   Then there is Minister Louis whose condemnation of Israel sticks like a bone in the throat of many people. As far as I can tell the members of the Nation of Islam are extremely cultured, well educated, hard working people whose children are well mannered and behaved by the standard of everyone's standards. Their basic slogan for over sixty years has been "do for self."   In the 21st century the demand for self determination up to and including the formation of an independent state is . . .  generally speaking . . . the calling card of the militant bourgeoisie and reactionaries of all kinds. There are a couple of exceptions to this rule.   It has baffled me for 30 years how the revolutionaries and progressives in America . . . who cry crocodile tears about everyone else never say anything about the national factor in OUR own country.   Lenin said such and such . . . Trotsky said this and that . . . Stalin made the people have a national movement from such and such policy . . . Putin should do this or that . . . the Russians are such and such . . . .   What of bourgeois America? Breaking up the US multinational state system will not cause the Mexicans in the American Union or Indians to gravitate to US imperialism because US imperialism is the enemy of the people of the world and breaking up this state would set the basis for real freedom. At any rate it sure as hell would break the back of the main instrument that holds the African American people . . . as a people . . . in an intractable social position.   But . . . then again . . . this means the lose of some deeply ingrained privileged social positions. The demographics of American society are going to play themselves out with increasing force in the next one hundred years.   Enough.   Melvin P.