The actions of Christopher Dorner continue to reverberate throughout the U.S. days after his predictable February 12 execution-by-fire by an assortment of police agencies in San Bernardino, California.
Dorner’s actions struck a chord within the U.S. domestically colonized African community that even now causes concern for a U.S. government hell-bent on convincing the world of its democratic credentials even as it continues to export war and misery in a desperate attempt to maintain the status quo of white wealth resting on poverty and repression for the world’s majority.
Barack Hussein Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency of the U.S. had the function of contributing to the notion of the U.S. being that enviable place in the world where even one who is representative of the lowest station in life can dare to hope for the highest possible achievement.
However, as Obama was eloquently justifying his own contribution to the U.S. legacy of war and colonial deprivation the world over with his State of the Union address in Washington, D.C., made within the rarefied sanctuary of the mighty and well-dressed, a black man, African just like Obama, was being lynched in a chillingly familiar fashion by U.S. military forces in California on the other side of the continent.
And, like many of his historical predecessors, Dorner had to die an exemplary death to teach others like him the cost of rebellion.
The U.S. murdered Dorner to eliminate a living symbol of armed resistance to the colonial State in form of LAPD
This was also done to prevent the possibility of the consequences of an oppressed African population politically aroused and mobilized by our work during what would likely be a months-long trial had he been brought in alive.
Some have noted that Dorner was not a revolutionary, that his self-declared war on the Los Angeles Police Department was essentially personal, that the people he killed were victims of an individual who at best was unjustly terminated from his job.
This is true.
However, the thousands of people who supported Dorner’s actions on facebook and social media did not do so because he was unjustly fired from the police department.
Neither did we.
Some have seen our call for public display of support for Dorner as inconsistent in the face of our oft-declared opposition to individual acts of violence and/or terror as a substitute for organized revolutionary actions.
Others have found the same inconsistency in our acts because of our rejection of Django, the popular fictionalized character of a movie by the same name that set off on a vengeance-filled killing spree during the last years of U.S. colonial slavery as part of a personal mission to rescue his wife from slavery.
Dorner was an American patriot who, as one of our detractors so aptly put it, was against everything Uhuru stands for.
Dorner was a supporter of the Obamas, George Herbert Walker Bush, the Clintons, General Petraeus, Bill Cosby and an assortment of other equally despicable enemies of African and other oppressed peoples within the U.S. and around the world.
He proudly declared himself an American by choice and his war against the Los Angeles Police Department was based on recognition that that organization did not live up to the American ideal.
Dorner’s “Manifesto” describes the reality of all Africans and Latinos in the United States and beyond
His war against the Los Angeles Police Department was a war to fix it, to make it better, not to defeat or destroy it.
However, Dorner’s subjective assumptions about “America,” the ideas in his head, were always colliding with objective reality, that which is in the world.
This is evident in his so-called manifesto, more like a last will and testament.
In it Dorner recalls having to fight for being called nigger as early as his first grade in school.
And while TV-sponsored psychiatrists used these words to prove that Dorner’s attack on the police department was due to some kind of persecution complex, proving him to be mentally deranged, Africans and others within the U.S. prison of nations recognized the truth of his words because of our own cradle-to-grave experiences.
When Dorner’s manifesto spoke of his treatment at the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department for defending one of its victims, it rang true to the masses of African people because we have suffered the same treatment from police departments throughout the U.S.
What Dorner is describing is colonialism.
All the Africans, “Latinos” and other Indigenous people are colonial subjects and the treatment Dorner is describing at the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department, whether his own or others, is the treatment of colonial subjects on every continent for all times since the advent of colonialism.
This is an objective reality.
It doesn’t matter that the colonial power speaks of itself in glowing terms and, in so doing, convinces the colonized of its superior ideals.
More often sooner than later, the actions of the colonial power will of necessity collide with the lofty ideals with which it clothes itself.
The concept of “racism” hides our colonial reality
Colonialism is the domination of a nation or national group by foreigners and aliens for the purpose of economic exploitation and political advantage.
When we throw aside the misleading concept of “racism” it is clear that Africans everywhere, like much of the world – like Afghanis, Palestinians, Mexicans, “Indians,” etc. – are colonized.
We are colonial subjects ruled by external forces, notwithstanding such appellations as “second class citizenship,” “oppressed minority,” “developing nations,” etc., that are imposed on us by the powerful.
Dorner was also a colonial subject.
He believed the “white lie” and became increasingly enraged when he was unable to achieve this “American Dream.”
Africans were able to identify with Dorner and offer support to him because they saw themselves in his manifesto and because he was attacking an enemy that is well recognized within the African community by almost every living being, including those preachers and colonial sycophants that will say and do anything to appease the colonial oppressor.
The LAPD and the State represent white ruling class monopoly on violence necessary to protect its power to exploit
The Los Angeles Police Department is an arm of the U.S. capitalist-colonialist State.
The State is an organization of repression that has emerged in society with the arrival of class divisions, of the divisions in society that is comprised of the haves and have-nots and where the “haves” benefit from expropriating or stealing value, wealth, from the have-nots.
The State is the means by which the ruling class enjoys a monopoly of violence necessary to protect the status quo of wealth accrued by crass and brutal methods that result in whites in the U.S. having wealth 22 times greater than Africans and the majority of the Earth’s population living on less than $10 per day.
The organs of the State include the military, the court system and the police department.
In fact, the police department is the representative of the government with which most Africans are familiar, the one with which we come into contact daily.
The police are the first line of defense between the colonizer and the colonized.
It is some police organization guarding illegitimate borders that prevents the Mexican people from easily crossing onto their own occupied lands from Mexico.
Indian land and slave-generated wealth and privilege are protected for the rulers of the U.S. by an assortment of well armed and generally well trained military forces that go by a variety of names that include CIA, marines, soldiers, police, etc.
The capitalist State is inherently anti-African, Latino, etc.
While the State as an institution has existed since the advent of class society in Europe, the capitalist State, that is the one with which we are concerned today, the one to which the Los Angeles Police Department is attached, the one that came into existence following the end of European feudalism, is different from those that preceded it.
Before capitalism was firmly consolidated as a social system, the European State concerned itself with repressing an internal population of white people and contending with other European powers competing for the same resources.
With the consolidation of capitalism, the primary target of repression for the European State became the “others.”
It is this difference that gives Dorner so much in common with other Africans and with Mexicans and Indians and Afghans, Palestinians, etc.
This is because the capitalist State owes its existence to a social system that has slavery and colonialism as its foundation.
Capitalism is a product of slavery and colonialism.
It is a product of drugs imposed on China and Vietnam and wealth built on stolen lands the world over by enslaved peoples who are even today attempting to overturn this relationship.
This is why the prison system within the U.S. is filled with Africans, Mexicans and Indians.
This is why the police always mistake car keys and cell phones for guns in the African communities of the U.S.
This is why the indigenous people of this land are in concentration camps called reservations and this is why Dorner was fired.
The capitalist State was consolidated through empire, imperialism, the attack on other lands and peoples that resulted in the world’s resources being concentrated in Europe and the U.S., which is itself a part of the stolen wealth of empire.
LAPD part of an international arm of white power domination
The capitalist State was from its inception international in scope.
Its tentacles spread over the globe, wherever there was loot to be stolen and protected, sometimes from its victims and other times from contending European predators.
The British often bragged that their police did not carry guns – in England.
But they carried them in India, Ireland, Kenya, Sudan and throughout Africa and other places where their colonies were located.
Increasingly they have begun to carry guns in England as well, because like in the U.S., which has always possessed internal colonies, more of the British colonial subjects have made their way to England, desperately following their stolen resources in search for a better way of life.
The fact that colonialism is the foundation of capitalism is what has generally provided an element of domestic stability within the European and U.S. capitalist centers.
Today that stability is being challenged by the shifting balance of power in the world that is increasingly favoring the colonized and previously colonized peoples and countries.
It is the struggles of peoples to take back their lives and resources that are responsible for the economic crisis that is roiling Europe and resulting in growing social instability.
This is the basis of this era of permanent warfare, the imposition of the militarized U.S. imperialist colonial state on the continent of Africa and within the U.S., the incessant threat of war against Iran, the imperialist quagmire in the Middle East, the intensification of military maneuvering in the Asia Pacific Basin, ad infinitum.
The ruling class media aren’t talking about it, but the similarities of Dorner’s actions and those of Afghanis, trained by U.S. colonial occupying troops who turn their guns on their U.S. trainers, immediately come to mind.
Dorner and the Afghanis are part of an occupying colonial army used to oppress their own people.
In Los Angeles the victims are the niggers and wetbacks while in Afghanistan and the Middle East they are the Sand Niggers, Rag Heads and other venomous characterizations imposed on colonial subjects by occupying forces that dehumanize them and make their oppression more acceptable and obligatory.
The Afghan that turns his gun on his U.S. handler may have also bought into the American ideal.
After all, one element of a counterinsurgent strategy is the much vaunted “winning the hearts and minds” of the occupied.
The problem is that winning the hearts and minds is contradictory to the objective of colonial occupation, which is, simply stated, conquest.
The objective of occupation in Los Angeles is also conquest.
When speaking of the Mexicans coming across the illegitimate border some U.S. ideologues have picked up on the term popularized by Mexican journalists and writers referring to the influx of Mexicans crossing the U.S. imposed border as the re-conquest, La Reconquista.
The historic memory of the relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor is firmly entrenched within the institution of the colonial State, even if it is occasionally forgotten by individuals of the oppressed and oppressor nations.
Christopher Dorner forgot this history.
Dorner exposed all-powerful colonial State as paper tiger
He was born after the Black Revolution of the Sixties had been defeated.
His historical and moral references were not Malcolm X, Patrice Lumumba, Che Guevara, the 10-Point Program of the Black Panther Party or the program of the Junta of Militant Organizations (JOMO).
The U.S. colonial State that Dorner was taught to love had killed most of them off and offered itself and its icons as the only political points of reference for a black boy who grew up in lily white circumstances and who wanted to do the right thing.
Dorner was a U.S. patriot, a white nationalist by definition and from his limited perspective, “by choice.”
However, our call for public demonstration of support for Dorner had nothing to do with his own consciousness.
It had to do with Dorner’s attack on the capitalist-colonialist State, the destruction of which is an absolute necessity for Africans to win our freedom.
It had to do with our recognition that the power of the colonial State does not simply rest in its military power or prowess.
It is also connected with its projection of invincibility.
The State is that all-knowing, all-powerful entity, the metaphorical City Hall that it is impossible to fight.
Dorner revealed the State as the proverbial Paper Tiger, as Oz, a shallow, fragile empty shell when its sense of invincibility is shattered, it loses its claim to moral authority and its agents face the likelihood of inglorious death.
The power of the colonial State also requires the belief in the legitimacy of its authority by its colonial subjects.
It is no accident that the courtrooms of the oppressors can barely be distinguished from their churches and cathedrals by appearance.
With their high ceilings, robed authority figures seated behind altar-like benches; with their religious-like ceremony and decorum, the colonial courts prey on a state-created superstition to win docility from their victims.
Until they were certain that Dorner was sighted, cornered and within kill range, the Police Department of Los Angeles, that expert in instilling fear in the hearts of the oppressed was nearly paralyzed.
The department was forced to spend millions of dollars organizing a defensive position protecting police headquarters, officers, agents of the State, from one black man—Christopher Dorner!
This did not go unnoticed by Africans.
It could not go unnoticed, not only because frightened Los Angeles Police were shooting at various people who bore no resemblance to Dorner, but we also saw quivering representatives of the police department whining about their fears and innocence on national television.
Dorner was not Django, the invention of a white liberal
Our call for public display of support for Dorner was a call for a public, collective repudiation of the authority of the colonial state over our lives, something from which the State will find it difficult to overcome.
It was not because we thought Dorner was a revolutionary.
It was because we are.
Dorner penetrated the mystique of the colonial State, something any genuine revolutionary effort would strive to accomplish.
Dorner was not Django.
Django was the figment of a white liberal imagination that was responding to the severe crisis of imperialism represented by the peoples of the world up in arms against U.S. imperialism.
Django was a fictional response to an obvious threat to the “American way of life” that is shakily attached to the blood drenched, life-depriving social system that has dominated the world for the last few hundred years.
Django, the fictional lone black killer fighting for a fictional American way was a solution offered up by a white liberal in the era of Obama, his Django.
Django was a preferred solution for a liberal who fears the mobilization of the organized dark masses who would overturn the entire system.
We reject this fictionalized solution.
A single killer out for revenge is not a revolutionary solution.
Good fiction would have brought the masses into the equation; it would have mobilized the enslaved masses to overturn the system of slavery while killing the slave master.
If Dorner were fiction he would be bad fiction.
Good fiction would be Sam Greenlee’s “Spook Who Sat by the Door,” the fictionalized CIA agent who used his learned skills to organize urban guerilla warfare by the colonized African masses.
But Dorner was not fiction; he was real and he was being experienced by the masses and the colonial State.
Dorner was not a revolutionary, but we are.
We did not make him up, nor did we make up the script that was unfolding before our eyes and clearly resonating with the masses of our people who are still involved in a schizophrenic relationship with the U.S. colonial State because its public face is Barack Hussein Obama.
Africans in imperialist armies throughout the world should, like Dorner, turn their guns against their imperialist masters
Moreover, notwithstanding Dorner’s own interpretation of what he was doing, the subjective factor that was his motivation, he was attacking the U.S. colonial State and that had political value in the imagination of the masses of our people and in its impact on the objective functioning of the State.
Therefore, because we revolutionaries are here to give meaning to his actions, they can be defined as serving the revolution independent of Dorner’s will.
When we look at Dorner’s action we do so as revolutionaries who intend to make a revolution and who, in doing so, will give definition and meaning to every occurrence that will contribute to the revolutionary project.
Unlike with Django where we had no control of the script, we African Internationalist revolutionaries are participating in writing this script even after the death of Dorner.
Our belief in organized revolutionary activity does not prevent us from calling on individual Africans fighting imperialist-backed proxy wars in Congo, Mali and Somalia to embrace their worker and peasant brothers and sisters and turn their guns on their neocolonial officers and imperialist bosses instead.
It does not prevent us from recognizing that the fact of occupation alone is nearly enough to qualify an attack on an occupation force as an act of anti-colonial resistance, independent of the consciousness of the perpetrator.
While this may be difficult for some to understand, African Internationalists do not judge a movement by its own consciousness; we do not judge a person by what he thinks of himself or by his self-defined motivation.
A U.S. soldier in Afghanistan may think of himself as an agent of democracy, but this does not change the fact that he is actually an agent of empire, an arm of an occupying colonial State.
Similarly, Dorner’s fight against the State because of job loss or corruption does not determine the character of his actions.
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In fact, while Dorner complained about the corruption of the Los Angeles Police Department, we know that it is not corruption that defines the Los Angeles Police Department.
It is defined because it is the State, which by its very nature is repressive and, as the colonial State, must oppress Africans and other colonial subjects.
U.S. government murder and negro sell-outs have pushed the memory of revolution from the consciousness of African people
The memory of revolutionary activity has been pushed from the public consciousness, first by the gun and accompanying terror and then by ideological warfare, accompanied by the success of a narrow middle class or petty bourgeois sector of our colonized community that has, with the assistance of the U.S. ruling class, defined its “accomplishments” at our expense as a victory of black power.
With the gun, the colonial State murdered our leaders, crushed most of our revolutionary organizations, imprisoned and scattered their members and facilitated the rise of its puppets – preachers and rhymesters, pacifists, sycophants and hustlers all – as the respectable leaders of our oppressed people whose only task was to be like them.
The historical amnesia imposed on our community has allowed isolated individuals huddled in front of the screens of computers, connected to the masses only through cyberspace, to substitute their frequent “posting” for making revolution that will win a liberated and united socialist Africa and African people.
This has contributed to some confusion about our actions in some circles.
This is a call to join the African People’s Socialist Party and the struggle for international revolutionary black power
Ours is not a general call to the masses to be like Christopher Dorner.
And, while it is a call to every colonial subject employed by the colonial State to emulate Dorner, the general call is to join the revolutionary African People’s Socialist Party in every city, state or country where Africans are located.
It is a call to be like revolutionaries, whose responsibility is always to solve the problem of the revolution.
This includes explaining and embracing the acts of Dorner and others who, regardless of their level of political development, objectively carry out acts of resistance to colonialism.
Like us, the U.S. colonial ruling class and State recognize that Dorner is not a revolutionary.
But they are concerned nevertheless.
They are concerned because they know that Dorner is the canary in the tunnel, a harbinger of things to come.
They know this because of the reception his actions got from the colonial masses in the U.S.
They know this because resistance to colonial domination characterizes the world and Africans in the U.S. are a part of the world.
They know this because they are confronted with an array of insoluble political and economic contradictions within the U.S. and throughout the world.
But even more importantly the ruling class knows that Dorner is a glimpse of the future because of what they have seen by the oppressed African masses in the U.S. in the past.
They have not forgotten the Black Revolution of the Sixties and they know that the assassinations and other colonial brutality will not prevail forever, especially in the face of the growing world contradictions.
The occupied Afghan and African colonial subjects are proving themselves to be unreliable tools of colonial oppression in today’s world.
This is why Drones, computers and other automated modes of warfare are becoming increasingly necessary for world domination.
Drones and computers don’t have consciousness and are less likely to turn on their handlers.
They don’t have to believe in their missions and are not subject to suicide or rebellion and they cannot be demeaned by name-calling.
Increasingly, colonial subjects are, like Dorner, defending their names.
Increasingly, there is a greater likelihood that African colonial subjects like Dorner will claim their names, lost long ago to imperialism.
As this happens the defense of a name will not be the same as defense of colonialism; it will be at the expense of colonialism and hasten the defeat of a putrid social system that is incapable of standing on its own feet.
