In this 1937 book on the Basic Tactics of Guerilla Warfare, Mao Tse Tung wrote:
“The peculiar quality of the operations of a guerrilla unit lies entirely in taking the enemy by surprise.”
A fundamental principle of war is and always has been the element of surprise.
When the African People’s Socialist Party formed the solidarity movement, they did something groundbreaking and historic that was never expected by the white ruling class.
The enemy never could have anticipated it.
They infiltrated the lynch mob.
They broke into the slave master’s house while the slave master was sleeping and they woke up his children. And they recruited the children of the slave master to play a strategic role in killing the slave master and destroying the system of slavery.
They organized us, white people, to go organize other white people like us, armed with the truth of our history, to function under the leadership of Black Power, and do our part as a front of the African revolution, inside the belly of the beast, in the struggle to destroy white power.
No one saw it coming. White power never saw it coming.
They never saw it coming because there is nothing in our history to prepare them for such a surprise attack. We have no tradition of breaking away from the rulers to unite with the oppressed. To the contrary, our legacy has been total, unanimous complicity with our ruling class.
Often, we jumped ahead of the ruling class to carry out murder and terrorism against African and Indigenous people so we could climb up on your backs and build a future for our children at the expense of you and your children.
But now, with the creation of the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, the white ruling class can no longer count on the absolute unity of the white population.
As the crisis of imperialism intensifies, when it comes time for them to rally the troops, the white rulers will look over their shoulders expecting to see us, and instead, they will either see nothing at all, or they will see us marching for their heads, armed with our torches and shovels ready to burn and bury their asses in the ground forever.
Our work is reparations. The U.S. owes reparations. Europe owes reparations. Wall Street owes reparations. White people owe reparations. Every white person owes reparations to African people.
Reparations is our responsibility. Because there is not a single cent or dollar in the white community that is not drenched in the blood of Africa. Every dream and aspiration in the white world is built on the crushed hopes and scarred and tortured bodies of millions of African people for six hundred years.
We live in a world economy where our prosperity is intimately linked with the poverty inflicted on the rest of the planet. The assault on Africa rescued us from the rotting, reeking, disease-ridden feudal cesspool of Europe and catapulted us into the position of the wealthiest, most powerful people on the planet, a status protected by nuclear weapons, white phosphorous, Agent Orange, napalm, torture, lynching, scalping, rape, genocide.
We live on the pedestal of an economy whose bottom gear is torture.
We murdered, we burned, we tortured. Right now, as you’ve probably seen in the media, there’s a bunch of white people calling for maximum punihsment of these four African teenagers in Chicago for supposedly torturing a white kid, but the reality is that African people are the victims of torture. At the height of chattel slavery white people inflicted torture more often than in any other human society in history. If you went into a warehouse and looked around at the tools, every tool in the shed would have been converted at some point into a method of torture.
There is no horror movie that I’ve seen, and I’ve seen many, that comes close to what we did to African people and Indigenous people to take our place on the pedestal. Not The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, not Nightmare on Elm Street, doesn’t even come close.
We have to take responsibility for this reality.
We talk about joining the rest of humanity. But we don’t get to just into the family after six hundred years of lynching and rape. We don’t get to just wear dreadlocks or start rapping and suddenly, we’re cool, we’re down.
We have to repair the damage. And the only way to do that is through reparations.
Reparations means white solidarity with Black Power.
It’s not about feeling guilty – although if you’re white and you feel guilty, it’s probably because… we are guilty.
It’s not just an empty apology – words that amount to nothing – like those veterans who went to Standing Rock and apologized to the native people for living on their stolen land, meanwhile continuing to live on their stolen land.
It’s not charity. Which says, I will rob you of everything that belongs to you and then throw some change at you so you don’t starve to death today.
It’s not anti-racism. Which says, believe me, I’ve unlearned my granny’s racist ways. I’m one of the good ones. I wear a safety pin. I have black friends. My best friend is black. Take my word for it. I’ve checked my privilege
No. That’s not what this is about.
This is about changing the world.
The African Revolution is changing the world.
This is about solidarity with the African revolution.
Chairman Omali Yeshitela painted, with the paintbrush of African Internationalism, a beautiful picture of the future of a liberated Africa in his political report to this plenary. Free Africa will be the birthplace of a socialist humanity.
That is the future that we in the USM want to live and fight for.
There is nothing else.
We hate this society. Even if we cannot articulate it. White people are checking out everyday in various forms.
This society that we inhabit and benefit from, it has no redeeming qualities. But the future is here. You don’t have to shoot heroin, get drunk or kill yourself.
The future is right here. It’s called THE AFRICAN REVOLUTION.
And we can be a part of it by taking up our work to go back into the white community as the Black Power in white face and unleash the stolen resources as reparations back into the hands of African people struggling to be free.
That is our only future. Our only future is in solidarity with African liberation.
So it’s my honor to introduce this workshop to you today. It has been an incredible year of crisis, resistance and the rise of glorious Party of the African working class. I’ve seen a lot of white liberals lamenting what a horrible year 2016 was… but 2016 was awesome.
This was the year of the rise of the Party. This period has seen the rapid growth of USM with the doubling of our membership, the holding of Seven Days in Solidarity with African People, and our membership and branches building and expanding throughout the U.S.
In this workshop today we will present to you a video produced by our comrade Kefira Baron, documenting in a thumbnail sketch the amazing year of reparations work of USM in 2016!
After the video you will experience three back-to-back presentations by three powerful leaders in USM that will give you a sense of the type of work we are planning to carry out in this year of 2017.
First you will hear from comrade Johann Bedingfield, the National Outreach Chair of USM, and the Chair of the newly formed USM Disability Working Group. Johann will speak on our work for this upcoming year to organize every sector of white society that experiences any oppression within white society because we understand that it is white power that is responsible for that.
Just a quick note about that. Right now imperialism is in crisis so they are trying to consolidate their ranks by opening the doors to every white person: white LGBT people can join the military, white women can join the military, white trans people can even join the military and Obama is the great savior for making that happen. But really they want to use you to put you in their meat grinder and use you to kill Arabs and Africans and steal their resources. USM is the weapon for any white person to resolve any pain you have within imperialism and find your home, safety and security in solidarity with the African revolution.
Then we will hear from Starr – who is the Political Action Chair of USM – to talk about the Africans One Billion Strong campaign. Because this year we are coming for the white ruling class!
Then we will hear from KC Mackey who is our National Economic Development Chair and who is also the USM Representative on the Committee for Justice for the Three Drowned Black Girls. She will speak on why white people must join the work to win justice for Dominique Batttle, Ashaunti Butler and Laniyah Miller.
Finally, the Chairman mentioned Susan Wirth. She was an APSC leader whose family was so convinced she was in a cult they hired someone to kidnap and torture her. In our work to build the culture of reparations we encounter the slander that we are a cult. They have it backwards. We are the escape route from the cult of whiteness. It’s not even in our mission statement but our little side thing we do is we rescue white people from the cult of imperialism. Unfortunately for them, our “cult” is growing and theirs is falling apart. So let’s keep building it until we can crush theirs utterly and build this culture of reparations.
Uhuru! Reparations Now!