White Canada has a Black History

Goood morning slaves!

This week we bring you, “White Canada has a Black History”

In this sedition of ITEOTWAWKIAIFF we look at the growing class unrest in Hong Kong that kicked off a massive rebellion in the lunar new year. Also street battles in Athens, where anarchists and farmers stormed the Greek capital in reaction to Syriza’s structural adjustment policies.

On the music break we drop the now classic Dead Prez track: Malcolm Garvey Huey.

We continue with an examination on how white supremacy plays a role in the mass starvation of people in the African continent and we wrap things up with Ajamu Nangwaya, an anarchist, educator and writer from Toronto, who spoke to us about black history in so called “Canada”, the similarities of black struggles between peeps down in the US, and the role of celebrities in visibilizing radical politics.

This episode of It's the End of the World

as We Know it and I Feel Fine

was made possible by contributions from

slaves like you.

Spank you very much!

We have to maintain law and order

or we might as well be back in the jungle

Daws.... the ghetto is a jungle

always has been

understand? You cannot cage people

like animals and not expect them

to fight back some day.

It has always been an army occupation

here... with police, badges and uniforms.

You and me... a cop and a social worker?

We are keepers of this goddamned zoo.

Streets have to be safe.

Safe for who?

You're here to protect property,

not lives.

Well that's what it's all about

isn't it?

You worked hard to get what you got,

didn't ya?

And you wanna keep it

just like I do.

Bullshit!

Listen. You think because you got a badge

and I got a couple of degrees

that makes a difference?

Do you know what white folks

call people like you and me in private?

Niggers, Daws.

Niggers.

Gooooooooooood morning slaves,

and welcome to another sedition of

It's the End of the World as We Know it

and I Feel Fine,

the show that believes in showing

proper respect for the dead.

Into CNN to bring you

some very sad breaking news

on the death of US Supreme Court

Justice Antonin Scalia

He died in his sleep, of natural causes

overnight.

I am your host the Stimulator,

and I gotta say me and my subMedia slaves

have had a fucking hoot sifting through

the mountains of hate mail we received

from ancaps and Bernie Sanders

supporters, pissed off by our

last two shows...

Well, you got egg on my face!

Buuuuuuuuuuut

while it's tempting to take yet

another swipe at a low-hanging fruit,

this week there’s more pressing

matters at hand.

Namely... actual motherfuckin resistance!

So, with that in mind,

we turn first to Hong Kong,

where on February 9th,

residents of the scrappy,

working-class neighbourhood of Mong Kok,

decided to ring in the Lunar New Year

by getting into a giant fucking

street brawl with the mothafuckin pigs.

Shit kicked off when the po-po moved in

to try and clear out illegal vendors,

hawking food

and assorted New Years trinkets.

In the heavy clashes that followed,

militants hurled bricks, garbage

and other random debris,

and beat cops the fuck down,

with sticks, poles

and motherfuckin street signs,

injuring nearly 90 of them!

Mong Kok

was the site of some of the

fiercest resistance during last year's

Umbrella Revolution,

when for two months,

pro-democracy activists set up

occupations and barricaded major streets

across the city.

The crushing of this movement

only increased the palpable animosity

many Hong Kong residents feel

towards the totalitarian regime in Beijing

and in the year that has followed,

tensions have continued to build.

Despite being technically ruled

by jack-booted Commies,

Hong Kong is a major artery

of global capitalism,

with some of the highest levels

of inequality found anywhere in the world

The city boasts over

200,000 fucking millionaires,

while 20 percent of its population

lives in poverty,

and over 50,000 of its residents

live in literal fucking cages.

As this powder keg of social contradiction

develops, hopefully Hong Kong's proles

will be able to avoid the lure

of right-wing nationalism,

and begin to join forces

with the insurgent workers and peasants

kicking shit off in mainland China.

I think there's been a massacre

of workers rights

for pensions.

People will die, and they will never

get a pension.

That's why there is mass resistance

against this policy.

Meanwhile, on February 4th,

workers in Greece

staged their third general strike

in four months,

with 40,000 peeps taking to the streets

to protest looming pension reforms,

which have been demanded

by the motherfuckin vampires

of the so-called Troika,

as a precondition to the latest

injection of cash into Greece's

cash-starved economy.

Once the demonstrations reached Parliament

Anarchists threw down hard,

lobbing rocks and molotov cocktails

at Athens riot pigs,

who responded with tear gas

and flash grenades

in what has by now become

an almost ritualistic display

of mutual fucking hatred.

Never gets old.

Anyway...

by now the Greek left's love affair

with Syriza,

and its weaselly fuck of a leader,

Alexis Tsipris, is long fucking over.

Despite this, Tsipiris is still trying to

play shit off like he's cool in the gang,

expressing his support for the strikes

being carried out against the very

policies that his government

has been ramming down peeps' throats.

Buuuuuuuut the Greek people

aren't fucking stupid, and they

are well aware that they're being fleeced.

Syriza's latest capitulation

to the country's insatiable creditors

comes in the form of a steep hike

to taxes and social security contributions

which will have many Greeks

poneying up to three-quarters

of their wages

towards paying off the country's debt.

Farmers in Greece

have been protesting these reforms now

for weeks,

blockading major highways,

and sealing off the country's borders

with Turkey and Macedonia.

On February 12th, a convoy of

pissed off farmers descended

onto the streets of Athens,

and attempted to storm the

Ministry of Agriculture,

leading to yet more clashes with the cops.

Check this shit out!

As the situation continues to get

even more fucking dire in Greece,

and with no solution to the country's

economic clusterfuck in sight,

it’s a safe fucking bet that

the footage of flaming riot cops

that the country has become

world famous for

won’t be stopping anytime soon.

Here in the United Snakes and Klanada,

February is celebrated as

Black History Month,

where for one month of the year,

tens of thousands of white elementary

and high school teachers

present awkward, obligatory,

and kinda fuckin racist lessons

for their students,

on historical Black figures,

such as Frederick Douglas

and Martin Luther King…

Who invented the air conditioner?

A Black man.

and then explain how George Washington

Carver invented peanut butter.

Well Doctor Carver's

two dinner guests...

Edward "Skippy" Williamson

and Frederick "Jiff" Armstrong

-- two white men.

Stole George Washington Carver's

recipe for peanut butter,

copyrighted it, and reaped

untold fortunes from it.

Given the tense state of racial dynamics

in the post-Ferguson United Snakes,

this year's Black History Month

has been more political than most.

All around the country,

Black peeps are rising up,

reconnecting with past histories

of struggle, and publicly challenging

the racist status fucking quo.

Even the holy grail of American spectacles

-- the motherfuckin Super Bowl,

featured a half-time lesson

on Black history,

compliments of none other than

Mrs. Black Bill Gates in the making

herself, Beyonce,

who performed alongside dozens of

back-up dancers

dressed in Black Panthers regalia.

It was really outrageous...

that she used it as a platform

to attack police officers.

Oh fuck! Fuck me in the dick!

Buuuuuuuuuut

while the right-wing corporate media

endlessly debates

whether Beyonce’s performance was racist

and the nuanced difference

between the Panthers and the KKK….

another story is going largely

under-reported…

Climatologists are saying

that this past year's El Niño

was the strongest on record,

and it's having devastating effects

on weather patterns across the globe.

Whereas in southern California,

it has led to heavy rains

that have replaced the region's

long-standing drought

with widespread flooding,

in Haiti, on the other hand,

it has exacerbated an existing drought,

leading to widespread crop failures

and food shortages,

which have put millions of people

at risk of starvation.

Every day is getting worse.

It is difficult to grow crops,

because of lack of water.

Many are malnourished

and they don't have food.

And the scale of the problem

is even more fucking dire

in South-eastern Africa…

where El Niño, combined with the

pre-existing effects

of global climate change,

have set the stage for a looming famine

of biblical fucking proportions,

with up to 14 million people

already suffering from food and/or

water shortages,

and some experts predicting

that up to 49 million people

are ultimately at risk of starvation.

Just let those numbers sink in for a second.

Everyone is in hardship.

We all have so little to eat

because there was no harvest this season.

Scorching hot temperatures,

combined with an almost complete lack

of rainfall,

has turned large areas of the region

into a parched wasteland,

decimating agriculture in South Africa,

Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Mozambique,

Zambia, Madagascar, Malawi,

and Ethiopia,

where upwards of 8.5 million people

are facing food shortages,

and 1 million children

are struggling with acute malnutrition.

This tragic situation

is a bleak fucking reminder

of the ways in which white supremacy

is interwoven into the very fabric

of globalized capitalism.

While rich fucking countries in the west

throw out an unconscionable amount

of perfectly good food

every fucking day,

large areas of the world are

starving to death

in front of our very eyes.

Capitalism is a man-made fucking disaster,

which makes it that much harder

for poorer countries to cope

with changes in weather patterns,

which are only going to get worse

as climate change continues

to do its thing.

While the scale and scope

of these problems can be hard

to wrap one's head around,

they are ultimately connected

to resistance to white supremacy

and capitalism here at home,

as they represent the global consequences

of these hierarchal systems,

projected abroad via imperialism

and neo-colonial trade policies.

So...

to learn more about some of the

local struggles against white supremacy

here in Klanada,

and how they’re connected to

the bigger picture,

I recently caught up with Ajamu Nangwaya,

an anarchist, educator and writer

from Toronto,

and an organizer with the Network

for the Elimination of Police Violence.

Hey Ajamu, how the fuck are ya?

I'm pretty good.

Just battling a cold....

but I'm getting better.

So... it’s February,

which means it’s Black History Month.

In the past, you've been critical

of this term, and the way it's

framed by the media, government officials

and social justice advocates alike.

Why is that?

It's a cultural celebration... and it

is not focused on the need for

social emancipation.

Therefore, it is a time for us to

engage in a name change - but

beyond the name change is the need

to focus on political ideology,

political organizing... for us to expose

the fact that there's still a need for us

to fight against capitalism, racism,

homophobia... in the present time

and.. we haven't achieved emancipation,

which history kind of focuses on the past,

and not the present and the future.

You were an early member of

the Black Action Defense Committee,

or BADC,

a Toronto-based organization

active in struggles against racist

police terror in the 1980s and 1990s.

For viewers who might not be familiar

with this group or its history,

can you give us a quick run-down?

Yes.. the Black Action Defense Committee

was created in August 1988.

It was a response to the killing

of an elderly African man

with mental health issues.

Well, a number of activists came together

and said "we need an organizational

response to the act of police violence."

And that led to BADC. And it is is

in the late 80s and 1990s,

the most prominent group in Ontario

that was pushing for police accountability

that was organizing against

police violence.

Up here in Klanada,

most of the news and analysis that we hear

about police brutality comes from the US.

How is the operation of white supremacy,

as it relates to state violence,

different in both countries,

and in what ways is it the same?

I would say, fundamentally,

there's no real difference between

police violence in the United States

and Canada.

Because we experienced slavery

in Canada. And the police, as always

are the coercive element in society.

That is, the police, the military

has always worked against African people.

In the US and also in Canada.

So our relationship with

law enforcement, as well as the judicial

system and prison system, has always

been a negative, oppositional one.

On a similar note,

many peeps in this country are generally

familiar with the history of

the Civil Rights

and Black Liberation movements in the US,

and more recent historical examples,

such as the LA Riots of 1992...

buuuuuuuut are often less familiar

with the history of struggles against

anti-Black racism here at home.

How do you think this affects

the perspective of revolutionaries

here in Klanada,

and are there specific movements

and events that you think peeps

here would benefit

from learning more about?

The media dominates our perception

of reality.

And African Americans are living in

the centre of world imperialism - the

United States.

So, whatever they do gets projected

across the world. In Africa,

in Latin America...

a lot of us end up using African Americans

as our reference point.

So, whatever African Americans do,

we tend to pick it up

in our own spaces.

But we also, here in Canada,

have a history of struggle and

resistance, which is documented

but it's not as widely known

as in the United States.

For example, we know about

the LA rebellion, or the Rodney King

rebellion in April-May 1992.

But we're not aware of the Yonge Street

Rebellion that took place around

the same time.

A march took place

and it was a solidarity march

with what's going on in LA at the time...

but it was also a march to protest

the police killing of a young

African man, you know, during the

same time.

But we had a rebellion here.

It's not as widely known

outside of Canada

-- even inside of Canada.

Over the past couple of years,

Black Lives Matter has burst

onto the political scene,

and as a popular rallying cry

for racial equality in the United Snakes.

There's also an active chapter

in Toronto, which has employed tactics

similar to their US counterparts,

such as highway blockades,

to protest police killings.

What is your take on Black Lives Matter,

and what role do you see them

playing as struggles against

white supremacy intensify?

Initially when the movement came out

on the scene, I was more openly critical

of it.

But at the same time, in terms of its

ideological direction, it's emphasis

on more mobilizing people in the

street, and not necessarily

organizing people who live in

communities - whether it's working-class,

highly segregated communities in the US,

where we work with people to build their

independent organization to struggle...

But I've kind of, tempered my critique

of the group, because a lot of folks

who are drawn into it are young people.

They're becoming involved

in an organizational context

for the first time... and

we have to remember that young people

are going to make mistakes.

No doubt you’ve seen the clips

of Beyonce’s Super Bowl performance

by now.

Generally speaking,

what are your thoughts

on the role that Black celebrities

can play in helping to frame

popular dialogues on race?

To me, it's not so much

"Black celebrities", but to me, it's

the role that African artists

and artists in general

must play in the struggle for

liberation. Especially if you're

from an oppressed community.

You have an obligation to use

your work to advance the stuggle.

To raise questions in the minds of the people.

But, the thing that's very clear to me

is that artists, in a lot of ways,

cup what's going on around them.

So you notice in the 60's, even people

were doing like pop music,

they were reflecting themes

of the movement around them.

So, what we see recently,

with Lamar performing about the

Prison Industrial Complex,

referencing Africa as a place of origin...

or Beyonce... Beyonce like exposing

young people to the presence

of the Black Panther Party,

with this year being the 50th

anniversary of it's founding....

These things are happening

because there's like a rumbling

on the ground, or there's a

conscientized section of the African

population in the US

that are pushing... politically.

And these people are

picking these things up.

Anything else you wanna add?

As anarchists, we need to

organize with, and among the people.

Anarchism is the solution

to oppression in society,

but we need to be among the people.

You know, we need to approach them

in a pragmatic way, that we may not even

tell them that anarchism is the solution,

but if we're working with the people,

and we're looking at "how do we

organize?" and you start to propose

a program of broad participation,

so we can introduce anarchist

principles to the people,

and then later on... as they become more

politically developed, or they come to our

meetings, they'll realize that

my God... we've been practicing

anarchism for so long we didn't know

that's what we were doing.

So I believe that we need to be strategic,

tactical in introducing anarchism

to the people.

Thanks Ajamu.

And that about does it for this sedition

of It’s the End of the World as we Know it

and I Feel Fine.

As it happens with most guests,

it breaks my fucking heart

to edit the interview down

to fit the format.

I really recommend that y'all listen

to my entire conversation with Ajamu.

His insight into movement and

power building are super solid.

To do so, just visit my fuckin website:

With that said, building this show

over the past 9 years is possible

through a lot of hard fuckin work

but also through small donations

from wage slaves like you.

So this week I want to give a shout out to

Laura, Justin, Robin, Guillaume,

Ranko, Hansen, Roman, Raul,

Max, Stephen, Karlis, Blade, Steve,

Jonathan, Jan, Jane, Samantha, Andrew,

Per, Flyn, Michael, Bear,

Leandre, Jesse, Agatha, Inca,

Scott, and Daniel

Empanadas

I also want to give a warm welcome

to the newest members of the taconspiracy

Sebastian and Anonymous

Stay tuned to this space

for more insurrectionary news

from the global muthafuckin resistance.

See you next time suckers.