Last Political Post For a While

I just watched a good video of the March 20 antiwar walkout at a local state school. But, one of the signs in the video -- "3,000 Dead, For What?" -- bothered me.

The main victims of this war are the Iraqi people: 655,000 dead according to the Lancet study put out in October 2006 and 4 million displaced, which is worse than the Palestinian refugee crisis. The Iraq war is genocide. Any other description short of "genocide" doesn't live up to the reality of the situation.

"3,000 Dead, For What?" -- people with that sentiment should definitely be united with and in that context struggled with. But, activists who know better should stop tailing behind that and the whole list of economistic slogans like "Money for Jobs/Education/Healthcare, Not War." If there's money to fund both the capitalist welfare state and the war, that makes the war right? Hell no. The war is wrong mainly because it's killing massive numbers of innocent people.

Creating that kind of internationalist consciousness is infinitely more difficult than tailing spontaneous nationalist feelings (which are also "antiwar" in a sense). However, if the goal is a whole other world without exploitation and oppression (breaking with the 4 Alls) and not just a "better" U.S. foreign policy, it has to be done. People's consciousness has to be transformed. And there already exists a basis for that, because: 1) many people of color in the U.S. come from countries that have been subject to the same colonial and imperialist treatment experienced by the people of the middle east and 2) the proletariat, because of socialized production, is an international class.

As Sunsara Taylor put it in a recent article: "Many in this country already gravitate towards a kind of internationalism in their sentiment that American lives are not worth more than the lives of others. This should be built upon as well as deepened with the scientific understanding of proletarian internationalism." Right on.

Naxalbari

This poem is about spring,
and the coming of rain after the dry season,
and the blooming of wild flowers,
all of them red.

This poem is about love,
and the romantic idea that the heart
is not a shape or a symbol,
but an organ in struggle.

1967 --
Genocide in Vietnam,
entire villages dropped into
American briefcases and disappeared,

that year and every year,
as long as the night sky promises bombs
and not stars,
and peasants leave this world drinking
the poison meant for their fields,

spring can arrive only with the
violent crash of thunder,
and love resides as much in the embrace
of the lover
as in the rifle of the guerrilla.

Naxalbari --
when your ground cracked open in May,
the ghosts of the debt-ridden, the lynched,
the tea plantation workers
who died without knowing the joy of a single spring,
streamed forward like an angry flood
and spoke through the spears of the living.

In Washington,
the powerful had nightmares for days,
but even then they could not find you
on their maps.

The problem, they told themselves,
was that you no longer believed
in the cycling of the seasons
and the renewal of the old world.

You believed in the spiral of the dialectic,
the beauty of the unknown,
and the hope buried in the contradiction.

In Newark and Detroit,
no maps were needed to know that
Naxalbari was liberated territory,
to know that Lal Salaam meant
Power to the People,
to know that spring thunder was a
harbinger of the long hot summer.