The New Dark Age

22 March 2017 — Black Agenda Report

Don’t Give the Black Misleaders Your Vote (They’ll Just Cash It In)

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

The Democratic Party acts like it owns Black America. It certainly owns most of the Black political (Misleaderhip) class, who “have used their local, state and national offices to facilitate the mass Black incarceration regime at every stage of its deployment.” These servants of the police state and war need to be challenged by candidates that reflect the left-leaning politics of Black America. The Black Is Back Coalition is seeking candidates.

Why Won’t the Black Political Class Won’t Denounce Trump’s Militarism? Because They Can’t.

A Black Agenda Radio Commentary by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

50 years ago Dr. King inveighed against endless wars of US global empire, prophesying the next generations would be marching and rallying against US wars in Latin America, Asia and Africa unless there was a profound change in US priorities. That change has still not come. Then as now machinery of war pollutes and defiles the planet and war budgets are always at the expense of human needs. But our black political class couldn’t care less.

Freedom Rider: Hillary Returns

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

How long should one stay in rehab after losing to Donald Trump? In Hillary Clinton’s case, forever. Clinton’s recent “coming back out” party in Scranton, Pennsylvania, shows that “there will be no deviation from the failed strategies which put Trump in the White House.” With nothing else to offer (except war and more war) she’s still running against Trump. “If Trump didn’t exist the Democratic Party would have had to invent him.”

Why Syria Still Matters in the Age of Trump

by Danny Haiphong

Much of the U.S. “left” is confused or on the wrong side of Washington’s war against national sovereignty and self-determination in Syria. Publications like The Intercept attempt to conflate Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad and Donald Trump, “thus delegitimizing Assad in the eyes of the majority of the U.S. population.” The tactic is closely related to anti-Russian McCarthyism — designed to distract from the bankruptcy of Democratic policies.

The Bethesda African Cemetery: Protests Trigger Government Response

by BAR Editor and Columnist Dr. Marsha Coleman Adebayo

African descendants have forced a delay in further eradication of ancestral burial grounds in Bethesda, Maryland, near Washington, DC. “The African graves were totally eradicated and the memory of the African River Road community erased.” The demand is straightforward: “The land holding the remains of African ancestors must be preserved as a sacred space and a museum built to educate, honor and commemorate the ‘lost’ River Road African Community.”

Capitalism: Unregulated Disaster…

by BAR poet in residence Raymond Nat Turner

The Gospel of the Invisible Hand instructs us that regulations are evil because they impede the holy quest for extreme profits which underpins the capitalist American Way of Life.

Neil Gorscuh’s Abominable Record on Civil and Human RIghts, Part 1

The Ford Report on the Real News Network

Glen Ford details some of the sordid and partially hidden record of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch.

Neil Gorscuh’s Abominable Record on Civil and Human RIghts, Part 2

The Ford Report on the Real News Network

Glen Ford continues the examination of Neil Gorsuch’s abominable record on civil and human rights, exploring hte central role of the Federalist Society in preselecting Republican judges for the last 20 years.

The Crimes of Israeli Apartheid

by Vijay Prashad

A new UN report “argues that Israel is a ‘racial regime’ because its institutions are premised on maintaining a Jewish nation by techniques of suppression and expulsion.” That’s apartheid by definition, a crime against humanity. What exists is one state, “with Israel having exercised its dominion in the entire land west of the Jordan River, but a one-state with an apartheid system, with Israeli Jews in a dominant position over the Palestinians.”

The Extraordinary Lynne Stewart

by Jeff Mackler

The author, a comrade of Lynne Stewart for well over half a century, celebrates her passion as “a movement fighter, a champion of all that is beautiful in the human soul.” Stewart put her life in service to the people. “Would it be that we all had that courage and expressed it collectively in the kind of mass struggles that are capable of bringing this damn racist, sexist, imperialist system down forever.”

Rwanda: The Absolutist Truth of Human Rights Watch

by Ann Garrison

Human Rights Watch acts as an arm of U.S. foreign policy. This phony “rights” organization backs the deportation and prosecution of Rwandan dissidents like Joseph Nkusi, who dared to maintain that Hutus were also massacred in the Rwanda bloodbath. Under a minority Tutsi dictatorship, “even using the description ‘Rwandan Genocide’ is a crime; authorities enforce a law passed in 2008 making ‘genocide against the Tutsi’ the only legal description.”

The Empire’s Fifth Column in Africa: Morocco

by Aidan O’Brien

Morocco’s newfound interest in Africa is linked to NATO’s attack on Africa and the murder of Muammar Gaddafi. NATO’s destruction of Libya completely humiliated the African Union. It tore the heart out of an alternative African future, and left Africa seriously exposed once again to the Western imperial virus: a virus contemporary Morocco carries. “Morocco’s body may be in Africa but its mind is in the North Atlantic and the Persian Gulf.”

March 23 was the Beginning of Apartheid’s End — The Battle of Cuito Cuanavale

(originally published at Black Agenda Report on March 22, 2011)

Apartheid South Africa responded to Angola’s 1974 independence from the Portuguese with a US-backed military invasion. Declaring that “the blood of Africa” flowed through Cuban veins, Fidel Castro dispatched the Cuban armed forces to confront the armies of racist South Africa in Angola. Between 1974 and 1988 more than 1100 Cubans laid down their lives in Africa to hasten the end of apartheid. This week is the anniversary of the historic battle of Cuito Cuanavale, in which Cuban, Angolan and Namibian forces routed the supposedly invincible land and air forces of white-ruled South Africa, eventually making possible the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, and the end of apartheid in South Africa itself, and earning for Cuba the lasting enmity of the United States. If we in the U.S. were serious about racial reconciliation, we too would celebrate the March 23 anniversary of Cuito Cuanavale.