The United States has heralded itself as the cradle of democracy since its inception as a republic. But in fact, Africans have been subjected to the greatest dictatorship in this settler- colonialist “nation” ever since it first proclaimed itself a democracy.
Africans have never enjoyed the civil liberties of American democracy as enslaved people and subjects of colonialism in America. The only thing meant for us under the slavocracy of colonialism was dictatorship, oppression, exploitation, cruelty and brutality. Democracy was only meant for the colonizers who condemned us to slavery. This is why we have always had to fight and die for civil rights and civil liberties.
Africans have been penalized for fighting for freedom
Throughout the annals of colonial democracy, Africans have been systematically disenfranchised in America, deprived of civil rights, human rights, and all civil liberties. When we gained basic rights for the first time after slavery during Reconstruction, the colonial State limited and curtailed our ability to exercise them by using literacy tests, poll taxes, and residency and property restrictions to prevent us from even voting.
We risked life and limb to vote due to intimidation and violence by colonial terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, whose hooded knights beat and killed us for trying to vote. With the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of Jim Crow, we have been stripped of all rights once again.
During the waning era of Jim Crow, in the mid-20th century, Africans fought for the civil rights that the U.S. gorvenmet denied us. Colonizer terrorists groups killed us just to try to register to vote. The police met our peaceful demonstrations, protests, sit-ins and other acts of civil disobedience with billy clubs, high-powered water hoses, snarling dogs, tear gas and mass arrests.
Medgar Evers was shot and killed. Rosa Parks was arrested. Fannie Lou Hamer was jailed and severely beaten. James Meredith was shot.
Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were murdered, and the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed, killing four African girls.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated during the upheaval, unrest and tumult of the Civil Rights Era in a country that claimed it was open to everyone and where there was democracy, liberty, equality and justice.
America’s ancient regime of Jim Crow fell during the Civil Rights Era. While America acted like it was seriously extending the civil rights, human rights, and civil liberties of democracy to Africans—retracting its age-old color line and opening its society and system for our nominal integration and assimilation into it—the colonial government was secretly undermining the Civil Rights Movement as it was diverging and morphing into the African Liberation Movement with the quest for national liberation and self-determination during the era of the Black Revolution of the Sixties.
Devastation of U.S. counterinsurgency
During the Civil Rights Era and the Black Power Era, the FBI sought to disrupt, derail and destroy the Civil Rights Movement and the African Liberation Movement through a counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO.
This covert operation of surveillance, infiltration, subversion, neutralization, assassination, imprisonment, disinformation, misinformation, and pacification was a counterinsurgency that the colonial government waged to crush the African Revolution.
African leaders like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Hampton were neutralized through assassination, along with scores of members of the Black Panther Party (BPP) who were murdered by the colonial police.
Political repression was justified in the name of fighting “communism” during the Cold War when the colonial government claimed communists were exploiting Jim Crow, racism, exclusionism, lynching and terrorism in America and using it in propaganda against America to tarnish its carefully-crafted false image as the world’s citadel of democracy and the leader of the “Free World.”
Africans who spoke out against the tyranny, oppression, exploitation, injustice, and human rights abuses of colonialism, resisted colonialism, and fought for liberation and independence were all labeled communists, civil rights organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress Of Racial Equality (CORE) and revolutionary organizations like the BPP were called communist- fronts and the Civil Rights Movement and the African Liberation Movement were alleged to be controlled and supported by communists from the Soviet Union.
Chairman Omali Yeshitela was deeply involved in the Civil Rights Movement through SNCC. He was just as deeply involved in the African Liberation Movement through the Junta of Militant Organizations (JOMO). He was imprisoned during the height of COINTELPRO. Nevertheless, he survived the counterinsurgency to found the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) after the defeat of the African Revolution.
Over the next five decades, Chairman Omali would lead the APSP in a renewed and relentless struggle against colonialism, fighting for freedom, national liberation, self-determination, democracy, and socialism, exposing the counterinsurgency and charging the colonial government with committing genocide against Africans and demanding reparations for the crimes of the slave trade, slavery, Jim Crow and genocide during 400 years of colonialism.
Recent FBI attack on Party
Today the APSP is at the forefront of the African Liberation Movement. Under the leadership of Chairman Omali, the Party is forwarding the worldwide African Revolution to free Africans colonized within U.S. borders and other parts of the African world, as well as Africa, from the colonial mode of production to unite Africa under socialism.
The recent FBI raids on the APSP and the Uhuru Movement were made with the dubious claim of collaboration and collusion with Russia to interfere in U.S. elections and spread Russian propaganda about America. However, these raids had nothing to do with collusion with Russia and everything to do with the fear of the growing African Revolution. They were the result of the Black Scare.
The Black Scare is America’s great fear of resistance, revolt, rebellion, and revolution by Africans under colonialism. Fear has gripped America since the first outbreak of slave revolts.
It is the reason all of the African leaders who stood up and took a stance against slavery, Jim Crow, and lynching challenged the colonial system and the colonial status quo and fought for civil rights, human rights, Black Power, national liberation, and self-determination have been surveilled, tracked, discredited, vilified, harassed, hounded, hunted, jailed, killed or driven into exile long before the Soviet Union existed and America embarked on its great crusade against communism during the Cold War.
The Black Scare has driven political repression in the African colony. It is why our communities have been so heavily surveilled by the colonial government and whose secret police has kept tabs and dossiers on every major African leader from Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X to writers, actors, and singers like James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Curtis Mayfield, and Aretha Franklin.
This has spurred a counterinsurgency leading to assassinations, summary executions, mopping-up operations, pacification campaigns, imprisonment, and exile. It has always been about stopping the upsurge of anti-colonial struggle among Africans and preventing us from achieving freedom. It has never been about fighting communism.
The Black Scare and the counterinsurgency are as old as African resistance to colonialism.
The FBI’s attacks against the APSP and the Uhuru Movement demonstrate the latest assault against the African Liberation Movement in a new era of the African Revolution.
U.S. hypocrisy exposed
The U.S. may proclaim to be the world’s model democracy, but the colonizer’s democracy can’t possibly be extended to subjects of colonialism.
Under colonialism, freedom for Africans has always been illegal. From running away from plantations to building steamship lines that serve the economic interests of our people, self-determination, the highest expression of democracy for colonized Africans, has always been attacked and made illegal.
Colonial democracy is the right of the colonizer to dominate and dictate over the stolen lives and resources of African, Indigenous and other oppressed peoples. Our evidence for this assertion rests in the fact that the FBI is attempting to carry out a legal lynching of Chairman Omali Yeshitela solely for establishing African self-determination through the work of the APSP.
These same attacks can be seen against Cuba, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Colonial democracy looks like drone strikes in Pakistan, proxy wars against Russia, starvation in Yemen, coups in Bolivia, and the incarceration rates for African people in the U.S.
The most logical and righteous thing for the colonial subject to do is to fight against a social system that gives peace and democracy to the colonizer at our expense. The reality of this colonial democracy is being exposed daily as the U.S. struggles to maintain its death grip on the rest of the world.
Despite these vicious and escalating attacks by the U.S. government, the Uhuru Movement will continue to fight for African self-determination. It will achieve it wholly in our lifetime.
Hands Off Uhuru! Hands Off Africa!
Fight back against colonial counterinsurgency: HandsOffUhuru.org
