Fwd: 'Hypothetical' Holocausts?

[Guest guest]

'HYPOTHETICAL' HOLOCAUSTS?

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[Col. Writ. 10/1/05] Copyright '05 Mumia Abu-Jamal

 

The words of conservative pundit, and former Reagan-era Education

Secretary, Bill Bennett, that the nation's crime problem could be

'solved' " if all Black babies were aborted " , is the echo in the hearts

of White America, voiced by a man who has made his post-government

career as a 'moralist.'

 

Already, so-called Black conservatives are marched out to defend

their colleague's words, with some saying it is a mere 'hypothetical';

an 'intellectual mind-game', according to one Negro neocon.

 

These words, coming in the shadow of the vast governmental

malfeasance and indeed, betrayals that lay at the heart of Hurricane

Katrina, where people, predominantly Black people, were left to drown

and starve by the tens of thousands, show that the space between

hypothetical and real, is thin indeed.

 

While the rapper, Kanye West, is condemned by the white nationalist,

corporate media, for daring to say that President Bush 'doesn't care

about Black people " , Bennett's far more pernicious comments, which call

for a kind of 'compassionate mass killing', are defended by Republicans,

ignored by most white Democrats, and blithely pooh-poohed by the White

House.

 

As for the corporate media, once again, in the rush to be first, it

sent out hours of reports that were based on rumors and lies, lies spun

by police and politicians, while cops staged looting parties, if they

stayed in New Orleans at all! Reports of mass rapes, and mounds of

murder victims at the Superdome and the Convention Center, dutifully

transmitted to millions of viewers, listeners, and readers, fed into the

fears of a nation already preconditioned to dread and fear Black people,

and the spectre of Black crime. Such lies, such racist imagery, allowed

nearby communities to, literally, close their borders to Blacks trying

to escape the rising waters, at gunpoint. Cops in Gretna, Louisiana,

charged Black men, women and children, trying to cross the bridge out of

the sunken city, firing at them. They later took their little food and

water!

 

The media, even in times of disaster, has to be more than a

megaphone for the powerful. Why didn't they talk to the people? Those

who knew, first-hand, what happened, and didn't happen in the Superdome

and the Convention Center?

 

They chose to go to the uniforms, and those with titles, and spread

poison that caused more damage to the poor, and powerless of the sunken

city.

 

It is not surprising that Bennett's words come, mere weeks after

Katrina. Was he not part of the first American presidency that went to

shed tears at a Nazi cemetery, in Bitburg, Germany?

 

There is not a holocaust in human history that didn't begin with

'hypothetical', or 'intellectual mind-games.'

 

Indeed, when Turkey was busy massacring the Armenians, US High

Commissioner to Turkey, Admiral Mark Bristol, a notorious bigot, was

performing a 'mind-game' that would soon mean peril for Jews in Europe.

Bristol wrote, " The Armenians are a race like the Jews - they have

little or no national spirit and poor moral character. " *

 

And who can forget Hitler's infamous speech, in 1939, when he

ominously asked, " Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the

Armenians? "

 

The 'mind-games' of intellectuals have real world affects.

 

There is, in American political life, a deep, abiding spirit of

fascism, formed around the kernel of White Supremacy. It made the

unspoken holocaust of so-called Indians possible, which in turn led to a

new holocaust against Africa.

 

That is the mother's milk of the nation, and still governs popular

and political thought.

 

We saw its face in government neglect in Katrina.

 

Bill Bennett, the nation's moralist, is its voice.

 

 

Copyright 2005 Mumia Abu-Jamal

 

* [*Source*: Christopher Simpson, *The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law,

and Genocide in the Twentieth Century* (Monroe, Me.: Common Courage

Press, 1995), pp. 33, 76.]

 

[Check out Mumia's latest: *WE WANT FREEDOM:

A Life in the Black Panther Party*, from South

End Press (http://www.southendpress.org); Ph.

#1-800-533-8478.]