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.
They can do anything they want to to us.
We might not be back
I might be in jail, I might be anywhere...
but when I leave you can remember I said
with the last words on my lips
that I am a Revolutionary
and you're gonna have to keep on
saying that.
You're gonna have to say that I am
a proletariat... I am the people.
I'm not the pig.
You gotta make a distinction.
And the people are gonna have to
attack the pigs.
The people are gonna have to
stand up against the pigs.
That's what the Panthers are doing here.
That's what the Panthers are doing
all over the world.
Goooooooooooooood morning slaves
and welcome to another sedition of
It's the End of the World as We Know it
and I Feel Fine...
where children are the future.
That cop was so drunk
he waved traffic into his pants.
Look... a pig on a hog!
Oink Oink! Bang Bang!
Hope that badge is bulletproof.
That's the car where they keep the bribes.
Car 79... we've got a Black man
minding his own business.
Meanwhile.. on the other side of town...
I am your host the Stimulator,
and October 15th marked
the 50th fucking anniversary of
the founding of one of the most infamous,
The state assembly was in the midst of
a heated debate when the young Negroes
armed with loaded rifles, shotguns,
and pistols, marched into the capital.
iconic,
That look....
y'know, the big afro,
the leather jacket, the shades...
politically sophisticated,
They were the ones that really came out
and started showing us how to
organize successfully.
and all-around badass
revolutionary organizations in the history
of the United Snakes...
the Black Panthers Party.
This anniversary comes at
a particularly salient moment
in mothafuckin history.
In the United Snakes, a growing awareness
of police brutality and systematic racism
has been thrust into the mainstream
by the Black Lives Matter movement,
while street-level rebellions
to white supremacist police terror
have been lighting up urban city centers
at a frequency not seen since the 1960s.
Can you dig it?!
[Applause]
Over the past two and a half years,
Black-led uprisings have kicked off
in Ferguson,
Baltimore,
Milwaukee,
and most recently, Charlotte, NC.
The Panther's emerged during
a similarly tumultuous era,
at a time when the reformist discourse
of the southern, rural-based
civil rights movement,
was rapidly giving way to
the righteous anger and militancy
of the primarily urban-based
Black Power movement.
Back in the summer of 1964,
50 years before Ferguson, pigs shot
and killed 15 year old Black youth,
James Powell, leading to six nights
of intense fucking riots in Harlem.
And 50 years before Baltimore
came the Watts Rebellion,
an even more intense six days of rioting
which, surprise surprise, was provoked
by an incident of racist police brutality
at the hands of the LA fucking Pig D.
Over the next three summers
riots broke out at a rate of
nearly one per month.
Once the Black people of the slums
got up on their legs and
defied the white police,
a tremor of self-recognition
seemed to go all through the Negro world.
"Burn baby burn" drowned out
"we shall overcome."
This wave of
insurrectionary mothafuckin rage
reached its high water mark
in April of '68, in the nights following
the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr
with incendiary riots breaking out in
over 100 cities across the United Snakes
in what remains, to this day,
the largest display of popular unrest
seen in the country since the Civil War.
The Panthers effectively seized
this widespread sense of Black anger
and outrage, and channeled it
into sustained revolutionary organizing.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, today
asserted that the Black Panthers
represent the greatest internal threat
to the nation.
At its height, the Black Panthers
had over ten thousand members,
organized into dozens of chapters
across the country.
They say a Black Panther
is born every minute in the ghetto.
Throw in the fact that the United Snakes
was at the time engaged in
a deeply unpopular and socially polarizing
war in Vietnam,
in which thousands of soldiers
were going AWOL, and some were even
fragging their fucking officers,
Do it.
and you can begin to see why the state
was shitting its proverbial pants.
Buuuuuuuuuut while that crazy fuck,
J Edgar Hoover, and his racist crackers
at the FBI were at the time
most terrified by the Panther’s so-called
survival pending revolution programs,
such as their free breakfast
for poor school children,
We feed about 10,000
across the country each day.
today they are most widely remembered
for their militaristic regalia,
and their embrace of armed self-defense,
and community patrols,
which they carried out
as a self-defense measure
against racist pigs.
Is that gun loaded boy!?
I tell you officer, it wasn't...
but now it is.
Many of the white-knuckled,
racist dipshits who lie awake at night
stressing about Obama
taking away their guns,
Come and get 'em Obama!
would no doubt choke on
their fucking mayonnaise sandwiches to
learn that it was the GOP's cowboy mascot,
the ol' Gipper himself,
Ronnie fucking Reagan,
Fuck Ronald Reagan!
who back in 1967,
as Governor of California,
seized on the widespread sense
of white panic provoked by
the Panthers' armed community patrols
and used it as an excuse to
uhhh... take away peeps' guns.
I don't think that loaded guns
is a way to solve a problem that should
be solved between people of good will.
And anyone who would approve of
this kind of demonstration,
must be out of their mind.
AAAAAAAAAAGGGGH!
In our current age of intense corporate
and social media saturation,
in which Black-led urban uprisings
are again becoming a frequent response
to rampant police killings,
white reaction is once more
rearing its ugly fucking head,
with many pointing to the administration
of Barack Hussein Obama,
either as proof that the United Snakes
has evolved into a post-racial society,
Surprise!
Study finds people don't understand
how racism works.
or else to frantically accuse him
of trying to start a race war.
A former federal prosecutor is sueing.
The suit accuses all of them of
inciting a race war, and it seeks
damages of more than $2 billion.
Buuuuuuuuuuut while pig-apologists
of the Blue Lives Matter variety,
endlessly try to paint victims
of police terror
and those who participate in riots,
as thugs or mindless criminals, their
collective shock and indignant confusion
over why Black youth would be angry enough
to loot or burn down shops,
speaks fucking volumes.
The fact of the matter is that
the “race war” has been raging
for hundreds of years,
ever since white Europeans brought
the first enslaved Africans over
to Turtle Island in chains,
and forced them to farm the very land
they'd stolen through the genocide
of its original inhabitants.
Settler-colonial capitalism is itself
a fucking race war, at the same time as
it's a perpetual class war waged by
those on the top against
those at the bottom.
So peeps shouldn't be so fucking shocked
when those at the bottom
decide to fight back.
We don't hate mothafuckin white people,
we hate the oppressor.
Whether he be white, black,
brown or yellow.
In fact, they should fucking join in,
and help overthrow this
racist fucking system once and for all.
One two three four five
Six seven eight nine
What I use in the battle for the mind
I hit it hard like it supposed
Pullin' no blows to the nose
Like uncle L said I'm rippin' up shows
Then what it is only 5 percent of the biz
I'm addin' woes
That's how da way it goes
Then you think I rank never drank, point blank
I own loans
Suckers got me runnin' from the bank
Civil liberty I can't see to pay a fee
I never saw a way to pay a sap
To read the law
Then become a victim of a lawyer
Don't know ya, never saw ya
Tape cued
Gettin' me sued
Playin' games wit' my head
What the judge said put me in the red
Got me thinkin' 'bout a trigger to the lead
No no, my education mind say
Suckers gonna pay
Anyway, there gonna be a day
'Cause the troop they roll in
To posse up
Whole from the ground
Ready to go
Throw another round
Sick of the ride
It's suicide
For the other side of town
When I find a way to shut 'em down
i shut 'em down, shut 'em shut 'em down.
As white peeps in the United Snakes
are freaking the fuck out
over killer clowns,
Let's show them how Homie gets back
at Mr. Establishment, shall we?
Sure.
[Screaming]
Black and Brown peeps around the world
are celebrating the 50th anniversary
of the founding of
the Black Panther Party.
Revolution has come... off the pigs!
Time to pick up the gun... off the pigs!
Buuuuuuuuuuuuut to say
this commemoration is bittersweet
would be a fucking understatement.
Outside of a Beyonce
Superbowl performance,
no serious acknowledgement of
the Panther's vital contributions
to revolutionary theory and practice
can gloss over the sheer fucking brutality
of the repression that
the United Snakes unleashed on its cadre,
and the organization as a whole.
This ruthless campaign of repression
was planned and coordinated by
the greasy motherfuckers at the FBI
through a series of dirty operations
grouped together under the
infamous umbrella of COINTELPRO.
COINTELPRO, pig short-hand for
Counter-Intelligence Program,
was already up and running
by the times the Panthers arrived
on the scene in '65,
having been earlier used to fuck with
Independistas in my homeland of Boriken,
also known as Puerto Rico,
as well as members of
the US Communist Party,
the New Left,
and various Civil Rights leaders.
Buuuuuuuuuuuut as it turns out,
that was just a warm up
for what was still to come.
In the five and a half years
between when they formed
and COINTELPRO officially ended,
the Black Panther Party was the target of
no less than 233 fucking ops
overseen and carried out by the FBI,
who used a toxic fucking mix of
surveillance, deception,
psychological warfare and
widespread infiltration to help stir up
internal beefs and provoke strife
with other armed organizations, in hopes
of inciting violent confrontations,
such as the shooting on the UCLA campus
that killed two influential leaders
of the LA chapter,
Bunchy Carter and John Huggins.
When this didn't do the trick, the FBI
engaged in straight up assassinations,
a prime example being the 1969 murder
of Fred Hampton,
who was killed in his bed by
a Chicago Police death squad,
acting under orders of the Feds
and with the active cooperation of
his personal bodyguard,
who just so happened to be an FBI plant.
At a time when every small-town
police department has its own fucking tank
and enough military-grade weapons
to invade Luxembourg,
it is sometimes forgotten that
the very first SWAT Team raid was launched
against the Black Panthers' office
in Los Angeles,
culminating in a four hour firefight
in which four Panthers and four pigs
were injured,
but amazingly, no one was killed.
As a result of COINTELPRO and
its unnamed covert successor programs,
dozens of Panthers and former Panthers
were framed up on bogus charges and
many sentenced to long prison sentences,
in some cases serving decades
in mothafuckin solitary confinement.
These political prisoners were joined
in the vast fucking bowels of
the American gulag system
by captured soldiers of
the Black Liberation Army,
many of whom were themselves
former Panthers who opted for
underground armed struggle following
the fateful split between Huey P Newton
and Eldridge Cleaver.
As the revolutionary threat
of the Panthers was receding,
the state massively expanded the scope
of its counterinsurgency operations.
In 1971, Richard Nixon launched
the so-called War on Drugs,
which Tricky Dick’s domestic policy chief,
John Ehrlichman, later admitted
was a thinly-veiled plot to target
Black peeps and anti-war leftists.
What matters is that Mr. Tynan's
clients and the Bureau have come up
with a solution to our Panther problem.
A final solution, you might say.
You give us free reign of the ghetto,
we solve your problem.
The pacifying qualities of heroin
are quite formidable.
The resulting wave of mass incarceration
was only increased under
the Reagan administration,
From the early days of our administration,
Nancy has been abusing marijuana
on a daily basis.
which cynically ramped up the
so-called War on Drugs, while
simultaneously cutting social programs
and using the CIA to flood
inner-city neighbourhoods with crack.
Shit got even worse under Billy Clint,
whose three-strikes federal
sentencing provisions led to
an explosion of prison population,
setting the stage for the system of
mass exploitation of imprisoned
slave labour - against which
tens of thousands of prisoners are
currently waging a historic strike.
Yup. Like I said, bittersweet…..
to say the fucking least.
Buuuuuuuuuuuuut while the United Snakes'
ruling class was ultimately able to
contain and destroy the Black Panthers
and has since honed and sharpened
its methods of counterinsurgency
and repression,
there is still much to be learned from
those who have experienced, first-hand,
the extreme lengths to which it will go
to maintain its domination.
So, to help uncover some of these lessons
and how they apply to
present day struggles,
I recently caught up with
JoNina & Lorenzo Komboa Ervin,
two former members of the Black Panthers
and current members of
the Black Autonomy Federation.
Hey y'all, how the fuck are ya?
Hanging in there... doing alright.
We're fine, bro.
You were both members of
the Black Panthers back in the day.
What led you to join the Party
and what roles did you play
within the organization?
Well in my case, it was at an
earlier stage.
I had been part of another organization,
a civil rights organization called
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee, which had gone over
from Civil Rights - by 1968 had gone over
to Black Power.
For a brief period, the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee linked up with
the Black Panther Party... in 1967.
They had an alliance from '67 to '69.
That's how I got involved.
I joined the Black Panther Party because
I saw all the things that were going on
around the country in terms of
police brutality, poverty and oppression.
And I realized as an individual,
by myself I couldn't do anything.
J. Edgar Hoover believed that the most
well-organized and subversive element
of the Black Panthers was its
breakfast for children programs.
Why do you think he found these so-called
survival programs so threatening?
And what types of programs do you think
might pose a similar threat today?
The survival programs, particularly
the breakfast program was threatening
to the US government because we were
talking about feeding people who were
hungry... children. We couldn't feed
all the hungry children, but we fed
as many as we could... and this drew
attention to the fact of poverty in
the United States - especially poverty
against Black people in the country.
That was really threatening because
they didn't want that kind of thing
to be highlighted at that time.
So they was particularly threatened.
There's a lot of hunger and poverty still
in the United States.
Obviously we couldn't organize
maybe in the same kind of way,
but you've got people who've been cut off
of food stamps here in Missouri.
They've cut off - in March they cut off
26,000 people from food stamps.
So you drive by these food pantries
and you see lines stretching, y'know,
for blocks.
So there's still a need for those kind
of programs. And if they had them today,
it would once again highlight
what's going on right now in this country.
This class warfare... war against
poor and low-income people.
After your time in the Panthers you later
became more influenced by anarchism,
while remaining critical of
the broader anarchist movement.
What sparked this political shift?
And what do you think are some of
the limitations of the anarchist movement
that impede its revolutionary potential
in the United Snakes?
At the time when I went to prison in 1969,
the Black Panther Party, the Black Power
movement was actually going through
a stage of being attacked and crumbling.
So when I went into prison,
into solitary confinement, I was looking
for something different in terms of
organization. Also, I saw some of the
errors that had been made by the Black
Panther Party and other organizations
in placing so much emphasis on leadership
as opposed to mass struggles.
So my thing was, when I became an
anarchist it was, the one thing that did
grab me was the idea that power
should be in the hands of the people
instead of in the state.
And then the criticisms of the state.
So I thought that was very good,
and my being a political prisoner,
my case was adopted by
the Anarchist Black Cross as it was
reformed in the UK.
I still think that anarchism has
some serious political value.
The problem is the organization,
and the failure to make the ties
to communities.
There's too much emphasis on activism
and not enough emphasis on
community organizing.
The Black Panthers emerged within
the context of the Cold War, at a
time of widespread national liberation
struggles waged by Marxist-Leninist
revolutionaries.
How did this political climate affect
the organizational structure of the Party?
And what role do you think this played
on how things played out?
Well we were, in the Black Panther Party
we were very inspired by what was going on
overseas, particularly in Africa
- the African liberation struggles.
We, y'know we saw they had different
models for how they were organized.
In a lot of cases they may have had a
collective leadership, or they may have
had what they called central committees,
and we sort of saw ourselves as fighting
the Black liberation struggle
here in the United States.
And to a certain degree we tried to
pattern ourselves after
what was going on in Africa.
We saw what they were doing,
and we thought maybe it'd be possible
for us to overthrow state terror
in the United States.
What are your thoughts on the role of
social media, smart phones and other
modern telecommunication technology
as it relates to the struggle
against police and the building of
a revolutionary movement more broadly?
I'm no expert when it comes to technology
but I am clearly able to understand how
the ability to reach people with a message
that you ordinarily would not have been
able to reach
- the Black Panther Party in its day
was only able to reach people as far as
its newspaper would carry it,
or word of mouth.
And it was significant to be quite honest,
but the truth is, in this period you are
definitely able to reach a lot more people
through computer networks.
I was really struck by the fact that
the fiance, the girlfriend of the brother
who was killed by the police up in
Minnesota a couple of months ago,
that she got on her cell phone and hooked
up with a facebook, I guess,
video messenger, and was able to let
people - I mean we actually saw him,
he was sitting in the car dying.
The police officer had a gun on her,
and her little girl.
And a lot of people in this country
do not understand how police terror
has worked for so long against
Black people and other people of colour.
And here was a prime example of
how it works.
What do you make of the current
state of anti-police resistance in
the United Snakes and some
of the specific calls for police reform
that have emerged from its
more prominent elements,
such as Black Lives Matter?
For a lot of the young people today,
y'know, they're becoming more
aware of police terror, and I think
Black Lives Matter has helped
maybe to raise their consciousness
on that level.
But I think the limitation is, is that it
has to get beyond mass protests
in the streets against particular
incidents of police brutality.
I'm not saying that should stop,
but you have to begin to have a broader
picture of how do we deal with
police terror in the United States.
How do Black and other people of colour
who are the primary victims of that,
how do we defend ourselves
against police terror?
What we need to think about
is building a new kind of movement.
An anti-fascist movement that wants
to transform the whole of society.
To understand that the police are
an intrinsic part of the government.
We need to educate broad layers of people
about what the police really are
- the police death squad.
We need police! We are not anti-police!
This whole propaganda line about trusting
the police, and their right to patrol
and all that...
we have to challenge the police.
And the whole idea that we even
need the police.
If we were able to build the kind of
society that was based on justice and
equality and freedom for the people,
we wouldn't even need police forces.
You know what I'm saying?
Just like we talk about abolishing prisons
we have to talk about
abolishing the police.
We need a movement that seeks to have
a social revolution.
That's what we need.
We don't need a movement that's
concerned about just making the
bed of oppression more comfortable.
We need to talk about
smashing it completely.
Smashing the state completely.
One of the most enduring legacies
of the Panthers was its embrace of
armed self-defense against police.
What role do you think that guns play
in terms of community self-defense
and building a revolutionary movement?
I think that the armed self-defense
was very important when the Black Panther
Party was started.
I think now we're in a situation
where the police are almost on
a daily basis in this country
arbitrarily executing Black people
and other people of colour.
I mean you can have car trouble and
stop your car someplace and wind up,
y'know, dead... your family's planning
your funeral.
So we have to talk about how, in our
community, do we begin to defend ourselves
against this police terror.
One thing that we have to stop doing
in the Black community is to call
the police when there is a problem.
This brother who got killed in California
recently, he was supposed to have had
a mental health episode.
His sister called the police to get help
for that mental health episode,
now she had had to bury her brother.
The Black Panther Party, we talked about
community control of the police.
OK... we have to begin to have that
type of control again in our communities
where we do not need to rely
on the police.
There's no question that we have to talk
about... the building of the next movement
has to be - it doesn't have to be totally
an armed paramilitary movement, but it
certainly has to be a movement that
practices armed self-defense, with an
understanding of going then to the stage
of revolutionary violence as a means of
not just defense, but transforming society
because they're not going to give up power
without mass-murdering as many of us
as they can... and they're doing that
now anyway, so we don't have any choice.
But the community itself has to reach
the stage of rejection of authority.
Rejection of the police.
And that's the role of the organizer.
The organizer has to be there agitating
and pointing out that these people can't
be trusted, never will be trusted,
and why they're a criminal death squad
and that they have to be removed entirely.
We have to push them out of our community.
Thanks y'all....and that about does it for
this sedition of It's the End of the World
as we Know it and I Feel Fine.
In case you didn’t know, this month
we dropped a rap battle video
entitled Trap News with MC Sole
to bring an accessible critique of
US electoral politics to the masses.
So if you’d like to share it with
your voting peeps you can find it at:
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through the new year.
Pejelagarto!
This month the following wage slaves
dug deep into their broke ass pockets
to help us keep the tacos rolling.
So big ups to: Deda, michael, hansen,
alberto, anton, oliviee, mathew, jacob,
samuel, ranko, louis, zach, oliver,
daniel, yania, peter, jennifer, francois,
ravi, maciej, steven, shannon, jonathan,
meghsha, sam, liam, margaret, derrick,
marten, max, igor, gregory, james, philip,
bridget, luigi, robbie, karen, jordan, maia,
jorge, tasio, leonard, pablo, sian, yifan,
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lara, jakub, jeremy, wolfgang, gavin,
jonathan, richard, alexander, david,
sadaf, dimitrios, joni, justyna, veronica,
kirk, marten, jonathan, khaos, marisol,
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flyn, bear, per, laura, fatima, glencora,
artist, angela, jamie, andrew, jane, jan,
alex rachel and eradour
Romeritos!
I also would like to welcome the newest
members of the taconspiracy: Anonymous,
Joe Lac, Veronica, Acracyp0nx, Cedzak,
Jakub, Lara, John, El, Maya, Mathew,
Apache, Bara and Talisman
Salbutes!
Don’t forget to stay tuned for more news
from the global muthafuckin resistance.
So sing after me:
Revolution has come... off the pigs!
Time to pick up the gun... off the pigs!