Fascism has established itself in a most disguised and efficient manner in this country. It feels so secure that the leaders allow us the luxury of a faint protest. Take protest too far, however, and they will show their other face. Doors will be kicked down in the night and machine-gun fire and buckshot will become the medium of exchange.
— George Jackson, Blood in My Eye

Minneapolis 3rd Police Precinct 2020
we fight fire with fire but their fire is fuelled by self hatred and ours is fuelled by the love of our people
In my short lived experience i have watched and seen the ways in which the state (primarily amerikkka) responds to our grief and resistance in the face of murder after murder. From “ferguson” to “Minneapolis” to standing rock to the stop cop city movement in atlanta. AmeriKKK nor KKKlanda (add about indigenous resistance + kanesatake) care about black and indigenous lives, and they never will, because to care about us would be to betray the existence of this state they hold so dearly to their heart. We must always remember what we are up against, and who the real enemy is, fascism. Fascism by design expands and eliminates anything in its path to domination. Both Democrats and Republicans, Liberals and Conservatives are fascist parties. I don’t care what they call themselves, they both have a stake in making sure that capitalism never dies. Reform is fascism too. No matter who is commander in chief, they are not our friends. No matter how “for the people” they sound THEY ARE NOT FOR THE PEOPLE.

Kamau Franklin, organizer in Atlanta
FREE PALESTINE FROM ZIONIST SETTLER TERRORISM AND STOP ALL COP CITIES FROM BEING BUILT TO FURTHER THE AMERIKKKAN PRISON MILITARY SURVEILLANCE STATE AND THE WAR AGAINST INDIGENOUS AND BLACK PEOPLE


Kamala is a butcher too.
“…with each reform, revolution became more remote[…]But if one were forced for the sake of clarity to define [fascism] in a word simple enough for all to understand, that word would be ‘reform.” George Jackson (Blood In My Eye, 1971).
No matter what happens and who gets power we must continue to mobilize against fascism and monopoly capital. We must mobilize against the forces that steal our land and our people and our culture. This world is being sucked dry and climate disaster is already here, but despite that there’s no way in hell we can sit by and watch it happen.
listen
“Noname, where she came?
We could stand in the rain
Maintain a good life, we could fry plantain
Same day the airstrikes strike down Iran
I ran into the house with a blunt in my hand, let’s smoke
I don’t wanna see death no more, let’s fight
They got the devil hiding in plain sight
That’s you, that’s me, the whole world is culpable
Why complacency float the boat the most?
I don’t really get it, y’all ain’t really with it
All that eat the rich, tax the rich, y’all ain’t really about that shit
Bitch, if you want some money, you can say that
You deserve the payback ’cause niggas took everything
Let’s go get that and take it to the hood though
Share it with community, we soldiers in plain clothes
Everybody got their role, don’t be an opp
Everybody got their roles, I’m a play mine
Like Scooby-Doo in a haunted house
I see the ghost that they talking ’bout, I see the signs
Read in between the line at the crime scene
I ain’t fucking with the NFL or Jay-Z
Propaganda for the military complex
The same gun that shot Lil Terry
Out west the same gun that shot some Samir in the West Bank
We all think the Super Bowl’s the best thing
Go, Rihanna, go
Watch the fighter jet fly high
War machine gets glamorized
We play the game to pass the time
Go, Beyoncé, go
Watch the fighter jet fly high
War machine gets glamorized
We play the game to pass the time
Go, Kendrick, go
Watch the fighter jet fly high
War machine gets glamorized
We play the game to pass the time
Go, Noname, go
Coachella stage got sanitized
I said I wouldn’t perform for them
And somehow I still fell in line
Fuck, I never need no name
I got a little bit of love and a memory lane
Picture me rolling up the bud, I don’t play them games
Yo, I never need no, no, no
Uh, I never need no name
I got a little bit of love and a memory lane
Picture me rolling up the bud, I don’t play them games
Yo, I never need no, no, no”
Noname “Namesake” (2023)
We all have a role to play.
The task of the artist is determined always by the status and process and agenda of the community that it already serves. If you’re an artist who identities with, who springs from, who is served by or drafted by a bourgeois capitalist class, then that’s the kind of writing you do. Your job is to maintain a status quo, to celebrate exploitation or to guise in some lovely, romantic way. That’s your job.
my role as a culture worker belonging to oppressed people is to make revolution irresistible. – Toni Cade Bambara
As i continue to figure out my role in bringing about revolution my current destination is using my artistic capabilities as a vehicle for political and cultural education.

Art by David Istvan
One thing that I wrote in last year’s piece, was that the uprisings in Sudan led to an explosion of public art. All movements— big and small— are accompanied and sustained by expressive and artistic mediums, which are the most significant ways we transmit and tell different stories about who are as Black people, as [Sylvia] Wynter reminds us.
The pendulum swings towards repression, and the weight that swings it back cannot be credited to national parties or revolutionary armies. It comes from music, poetry, dance— what Woods’ referred to as “cultural productions of Black working-class organic intellectuals.” Take, for example, Eduardo Mondlane, founder of FRELIMO, which sustained a 10-year war of independence against Portuguese colonialism. In his book The Struggle for Mozambique he argues that the earliest signs of resistance were not in the factories or in the barracks, but found in the traditional songs of the Chope people of southern Mozambique. He argues further that revolutionary and national consciousness was sown first in the traditions of the Chope— including folk songs and poetry— followed by intellectuals, artists, painters, undoing the attachments to vanguard is that has since long dominated Marxian thinking. The final stage— not the first!— of political consciousness was that of industrial workers and political organization. While [Frantz] Fanon argued in Wretched of the Earth that violence is the first act of decolonial melodrama, the activator, Mondlane argued that culture loads the gun, and armed struggle pulls the trigger. Revolution is, directly translated, about returns. Culture— blues, poetry, storytelling, offers, as Suzanne Césaire wrote, a return to ourselves. The pendulum swings away from liberation, and we must swing it back.
THE PENDULUM SWING OF BLACK LIBERATION By Bedour Alagraa
we must swing it back

Amilcar Cabral, Guinea-Bissau, February 1964
Public Domain Image, Courtesy Casa Comum (05221.000.030)
The study of the history of national liberation struggles shows that generally these struggles are preceded by an increase in expressions of culture, consolidated progressively into a successful attempt to affirm the cultural personality of the dominated people, as a means of negating the oppressor culture. Whatever may be the conditions of a people’s subjection to foreign domination, and whatever may be the influence of economic, political and social factors in practicing this domination, it is generally within the culture that we find the seed of opposition, which leads to the structuring and development of the liberation movement.
In our opinion, the foundation for national liberation rests in the inalienable right of every people to have their own history, whatever formulations may be adopted at the level of international law. The objective of national liberation is, therefore, to reclaim the right, usurped by imperialist domination, namely: the liberation of the process of development of national productive forces. Therefore, national liberation takes place when, and only when, national productive forces are completely free of all kinds of foreign domination. The liberation of productive forces and consequently of the ability to determine the mode of production most appropriate to the evolution of the liberated people, necessarily opens up new prospects for the cultural development of the society in question, by returning to that society all its capacity to create progress.
A people who free themselves from foreign domination will be free culturally only if, without complexes and without underestimating the importance of positive accretions from the oppressor and other cultures, they return to the upward paths of their own culture, which is nourished by the living reality of its environment, and which negates both harmful influences and any kind of subjection to foreign cultures. Thus, it may be seen that if imperialist domination has the vital need to practice cultural oppression, national liberation is necessarily an act of culture.
– Amilcar Cabral “In a speech celebrating the life of  Dr. Eduardo Mondlane, leader the Mozambican Liberation Front (FRELIMO) who was assassinated by Portuguese agents on February 3, 1969, Amilcar Cabral, leader of the liberation movement in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, described the role of indigenous culture in national liberation movements.  His speech appears below.  Ironically Cabral would be assassinated by Portuguese agents on January 20, 1973.”
(1970) AMILCAR CABRAL, “NATIONAL LIBERATION AND CULTURE”
okay one more quote, bare with me now
To gesture towards this thread I am following, I find it useful now — as ever — to consider the words of the late Clyde Woods. Writing about Hurricane Katrina over 15 years ago, Woods turned to French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre’s discussion in his introduction to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, of how the anticolonial wars of the 1950s and ‘60s undermined Europe’s claims to superiority. Paraphrasing Sartre, Woods writes that: “Hurricane Katrina has replaced the celebration of American civilization with a striptease of American humanism. ‘There you can see it, quite naked, and it’s not a pretty sight.’”
Yet even with humanism stripped bare, betraying its conceits, Woods reminds us that: “We must look at this disaster from the eyes of working-class African Americans, blacks, from the eyes of the impoverished, and, more important, through the eyes of impoverished black children for whom this is a defining moment.”
Black people have always ridden the pendulum towards, and away from, liberation.
“This new blues generation is being constructed out of the same disaster-induced social ruins that were created after the biblical Mississippi flood of 1927,” Woods continues, describing the blues as “a newly indigenous knowledge system that has been used repeatedly by multiple generations of working-class African Americans to organize communities of consciousness.” In Woods’ view, “The growing power of the blues tradition [of investigation and interpretation] results from its evolution as the antithesis of the neoplantation development tradition as the latter has grown to become the dominant national and international regime.”
Where some might term it dialectics, Woods shows us that there are grounded and lived vernaculars that describe the emergence of these antithetical and independently creative liberation movements, rising and falling like waves, or moving its weight to and fro, like a pendulum. Cedric Robinson described this as the Black Radical Tradition. Woods offers us another concept to add to this constellation of poiesis and struggle: a blues epistemology. In his introduction to Woods’ posthumous text, Development Drowned, Jordan T. Camp describes this as:
. . the philosophy of development that has been expressed in the cultural productions of Black working-class organic intellectuals since at least the Civil War and reconstruction. According to Woods, the blues epistemology is a way of knowing rooted in the historic redistributive agenda of freedom and labor struggles … an ethical vision that can be drawn upon in a struggle for a multi-racial working-class democracy … The Blues tradition refers to the countless ways that the working-class has struggled to survive while making its communities and the larger world more livable and just.
THE PENDULUM SWING OF BLACK LIBERATION By Bedour Alagraa
the African Radical Tradition aka ART. Blues, jazz, and hip-hop are just a few of the indigenous genres of music that have come out of Africans in the western hemisphere. There is so much power and resistance that exists within these artforms and have acted as the culture that loaded to the gun of many afrikan freedom fighters across the world. Our enemy understands the importance of these artforms of resistance and it is exactly why they have co-opted our music and operate to rid it of any revolutionary potential. The music that was once directly and openly pointing a target at the state is now used by the state to point the target right back at us. The united states has used programs like the Jazz ambassador program in the 1960s and 70s where they sent well known black jazz musicians such as Duke Ellington around the world to show the world that black people in the us were doing well and to ease racial tensions, as well as to co-opt the revolutionary spirit of jazz and use it for their own gains internationally. On top of all of this they put their own spies into these jazz bands on the road to gain intelligence in countries where indigenous resistance movements were gaining momentum. They were using this program to overthrow governments. Today the us state department operates a similar hiphop program where they send rap artists mainly to west Asia because of the growing rap scene in Arab countries and its use as a form of resistance against imperialism.

This is the enemy. This is what they do.
We have to take our culture back into our control.
Rather than allowing all of these big corporations to continue to co-opt our art and slap their name on whatever they please we must create as a form of resistance against these corporations. How much longer are we going to jump and celebrate over being the first black whatever. We do not need their white supremacist paperwork and awards to validate us and we do not need to create art to put on the walls of the devils house to make them look good. So many so called artists are a part of society that help to manufacture consent for the genocidal aims of the state. They sing their songs and tap dance for war criminals and tell us to vote for the devil (lesser evil) or die. Is the cheque that worth it?
Like noname said:
“I ain’t fucking with the NFL or Jay-Z
Propaganda for the military complex
The same gun that shot Lil Terry
Out west the same gun that shot some Samir in the West Bank
We all think the Super Bowl’s the best thing
Go, Rihanna, go
Watch the fighter jet fly high
War machine gets glamorized
We play the game to pass the time
Go, Beyoncé, go
Watch the fighter jet fly high
War machine gets glamorized
We play the game to pass the time”
jay z nor beyonce nor rihanna nor kendrick nor drake especially not fuckin drake will save us

interlude – it’s bigger than hip-hop by dead prez



Not only must we mobilize to counter their use of our culture for means of propaganda but we must also fight back against the idol worship of celebrities and more specifically as a call to my Afrikans we must fight even harder against the idol worship of celebrities on the basis that they are black.

Kamala Harris’ 2024 “u.s.” presidential campaign video with Freedom by Beyonce as the soundtrack (which she would’ve had to give consent for the song to be used)
in contrast with:










Beyonce’s 2016 Super Bowl Performance: A “Tribute” to the Black Panthers and Malcolm X
these are not our revolutionaries.
Ancestor el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz (Malcolm X) warned us about house negroes like y’all. using Black revolutionary imagery to deceive the masses into thinking revolution means getting paid millions to perform and lobby for the NFL and other institution in the name of black capitalism. when it comes to Kamala, if she wins i think she’s going to be used by the people who really control amerikkka similar to how useful Obama was to them. black faces that have a certain amount of charisma paired with strong media campaigns for change and hope. Obama dropped more bombs and killed more people than a lot of previous presidents, he’s a war criminal, and Kamala is a cop, a prosecutor who is a responsible proponent of mass incarceration in “California”. if we don’t learn from the Obama presidency, i’m not sure what to tell you. there are no lesser evils. no matter who wins this presidency, amerikkka will continue on with its global agenda for total domination because that plan has been set in since the first settlers landed on Turtle Island. The same way isntreal is continuing and aims to complete its genocide that it began when Theodor Herzl invented zionism in 1897. i need not want i need people in the west to get it into their heads that no one is safe and that this is not the promised land and things will not just get better by hoping for it to get better. we must move past this passive bullshit. we must move and get our head out of our asses and take some damn accountability for how our comfort here requires the blood of millions.
“We (in the West, as a whole) do not actually care about freedom, really because most of us cannot imagine what it would be like to be uncomfortable for the rest of our lives. It humbles me that we offer ourselves— we offer our minds— to be sold like this. I have so much revolutionary optimism until I open fuckin twitter.”
Threadings.


Harris, Palestine, and the Spectacle of Liberation.
a series of musings nearly entitled, “I am frightened by the way people tire of the world…

Listen now
a year ago · 440 likes · 49 comments · ismatu gwendolyn
ART both the creative medium as well as the African Radical Tradition has the immense power to mobilize masses of people. All of the music i have included in this section and this whole larger piece is an attempt to show the ways in which music and art alike can be used as a vehicle for political education and a tool of mobilizing people. The revolution quite literally will not be televised (by the western media) which is why it is even more important for us to be in control of our story and have the means of disseminating the truth to our people in whatever capacity that looks like (film, music, fashion, journalism, word of mouth etc.). Remember what ancestor Toni Cade Bambara told us “The war is also being fought over the truth.”
so yes trump is bad and evil and all that jazz but so is biden, harris and every other democrat who laid the ground for everrything the republicans and trump are doing now
canadian politics (pc v liberals v ndp)
“freedom where world-making and sovereignty is not to make oneself a God among men, but to see, allow, and uphold divinity in each and every man. Creation is an extension of the divine, where divinity is freedom. I was made in the image of God so I seek to be free, with everything.” – Ismatu Gwendolyn
Threadings.


the role of the artist is to load the gun.
an essay nearly entitled, “the orange trees teach me art-making…

Listen now
2 years ago · 575 likes · 32 comments · ismatu gwendolyn
thank you Ismatu! so much love please go read her essays!!!



“i can never un-love you,
and because i love you,
i must fight for you.
i must do right by you.
i believe we can unite!
why won’t you?
i need you to!
we need you to

we need you too.”

– @panafrikanrevolt