Since 1981, September 21st has been used to focus and re-dedicate global efforts toward achieving peace. But like many days created by the United Nations and global civil society to reflect the highest values and aspirations of collective humanity, the struggle for peace has been soiled by the moral hypocrisy of global oppressors.
Those states see peace as a threat. In the United States, 83-year-old Dr. W.E.B. Dubois was branded a criminal in 1951 for being the director of the Peace Information Center. In 1967, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. asserted racism, materialism and militarism were maladies of U.S. society that, if not corrected, would result in a spiritual death for the United States. When the Black Liberation Movement embraced an anti-imperialist and anti-war position and Dr. King correctly identified the United States as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, brutal repression took place—his life was taken and the movement was smashed. Today, peace activists and the peace movement are relegated to the fringes of political discourse, making direct repression unnecessary.
But, as Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton said, you can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t kill the revolution. The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) took up the historic task to fight for peace and human rights on April 4, 2017, exactly 50 years after Dr. King broke his silence on Vietnam.
We are committed to peace. But we say without equivocation or apology that without justice, there will be no peace—and for justice, we must fight for it. What compels us to resist? We see in the United States and around the world the barbarism of war, repression and imperialism. We see the structural violence of capitalism dramatically revealed by the coronavirus pandemic. We see the oligarchy’s cavalier disregard for human life has unsealed for the public a deeper level of understanding of what it has to mean to be anti-war.
So today, we celebrate the aspiration we all have for peace by re-dedicating ourselves to this cause: Extricating the power to wage war against humanity from those rogue states lorded over by the world’s rapacious, white-supremacist colonial/capitalist minority.
We say end the war in Afghanistan and prosecute the war criminals in the Obama and Trump administrations that provided weapons of war to the fascist Saudi state to wage genocidal war in Yemen. Say no to the new cold war with China, shut down the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and close the estimated 800 to 1,000 U.S. military bases around the world.
Peace, human cooperation, substantive equality and commitment to People(s)-Centered Human Rights are possible. These values represent the only rational basis for sustaining human life on the planet. Join us at 4 p.m., EST, September 24, for our webinar, Full Spectrum Dominance: From AFRICOM to Indo-Pacific Command, where we will discuss and strategize on how we can put a brake on the global bi-partisan war machine.
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