(Reprinted by monkeysmashesheaven.wordpress.com)
Inspiration to the Afro-American Struggle
August 8 was the 4th anniversary of Chairman Mao’s statement supporting the Afro-Americans in their struggle against racial discrimination by U.S. imperialism. In a statement, Afro-American leader Robert F. Williams said that Chairman Mao is the first world leader to elevate the Afro-American struggle to the fold of world revolution. Inspired by Chairman Mao’s statement, the Afro-American people are more and more turning to armed resistance.
Williams’ statement says that the nature and intensity of the present struggle of the oppressed Black people presents undeniable evidence of the impact of Mao Tse-tung’s thought on the oppressed people of the world. The Afro-American people, like their oppressed brothers throughout the world, have been inspired to raise their level of struggle to a new revolutionary height.
“The phony movement of passive resistance is being thoroughly discredited and more and more the oppressed Black people are turning to armed revolutionary resistance. As the Afro-American liberation movement engulfs and enflames major American cities, the Johnson Administration becomes ever more frantic and brutal in its desperate efforts to repress the heroic uprisings. It is resorting to to arbitrary and vicious arrests of thousands of Black people and their leaders. It is dispatching thousands of troops armed with modern weapons of war to murder and maim the long suffering victims of fascist tyranny.”
“The tide of the Afro-American freedom struggle cannot be stemmed. Johnson’s savage repressive measures amount to no more than: ‘lifting a rock only to drop it on one’s own feet.’ The flames of people’s wars cannot be extinguished by tyrants. “
The statement points out: “This is the era of Mao Tse-tung, the era of world revolution, and the Afro-Americans’ struggle for liberation is a part of an invincible worldwide movement . . . . In keeping with the principles of people’s war, wherein the great masses of exploited peoples of the world represent the rural masses surrounding the cities (the exploiting industrial countries), the Afro-American revolutionaries represent a mighty urban underground within the city. Our people will further develop and master people’s warfare. Every battle will be a glorious monument to Chairman Mao’s August 8, 1963 statement and we shall become even more fierce in resisting the tyranny of racist U.S. imperialism. We shall ever be inspired by the fact that Chairman Mao has said:
‘. . . The evil system of colonialism and imperialism arose and throve with the enslavement of Negros and the trade in Negros, and it will surely come to its end with the complete emancipation of the Black people.’”
[This article is from Beijing Review of August 18, 1967, from the "hot summer" of power seizures. The article echoes Lin Biao's Long Live the Victory of People's War! and applies it to the Black national liberation struggle. In these quotes, Williams distinguishes between exploiting nations in the global cities, the First World, and exploited nations of the global rural areas, the Third World.
Ironically, while praising Mao's August 8th, 1963 Statement Supporting the Afro-Americans in Their Just Struggle Against Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism, Williams seems to put forward a line contrary to Mao's. Mao's statement said, "Among the whites in the United States it is only the reactionary ruling circles who oppress the black people. They can in no way represent the workers, farmers, revolutionary intellectuals and other enlightened persons who comprise the overwhelming majority of the white people. At present, it is the handful of imperialists headed by the United States, and their supporters, the reactionaries in different countries, who are oppressing, committing aggression against and menacing the overwhelming majority of the nations and peoples of the world."
Much of the blame for crypto-Trotskyism can be placed at Mao's own feet. Mao was not living in a cave in Yanan in 1963. Mao had access to state resources to investigate global class structure. Blaming Mao's shoddy global class analysis on PLP is so silly as to barely deserve comment -- as though the Chinese Communist Party could not get its hands on accurate reports of conditions in the U$ or the first world generally. Even on the same page that the Lin Biao-Robert Williams line appears in the above Beijing Review article, there is a contrary line on the first world that appears in another article. MSH favors an honest approach to history, not silly dishonest cherry picking and distortion.
MSH favors the Lin Biao-Robert Williams line over the Mao line.]
