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99​:​1 Looking Forward Back And Now

by Hyp

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1.
There's a large increasing number of dark skinned people, swelling the dark population of France and Britain and it's giving them a great deal of cause for worry. No effort has been made to unite the Afro-American community or the American Negro with the West Indian community and then those two communities with the African community and those communities with the Asian community. This has never been done. And this frightens many powers, many interests in this country. Many people in this country who want to see us the minority and who don't want to see us taking too militant, or too uncompromising a stand, are absolutely against a successful regrouping or organizing of any faction in this country, whose thought and whose thinking pattern is international, rather than national. And there's a World Wide Revolution Going On. And there's a World Wide Revolution Going On. And there's a World Wide Revolution Going On. There's a World Wide Revolution Going On. It goes beyond Mississippi, it goes beyond Alabama. It goes beyond Harlem. What is it revolting against? The power structure! The American power structure? No. The French power structure? No. The English power structure? No. Then what power structure? An international western power structure! And there's a World Wide Revolution Going On. There's a World Wide Revolution Going On. There's a World Wide Revolution Going On. There's a World Wide Revolution Going On. There's a World Wide Revolution Going On.
2.
Well, I must say that, you know….people who are privileged are also the ones who are most hopeless and the most easily decide that there's no hope. (Fight The Power!) But the point is that, the alternative and the hope is not gonna come from the people who designed the system and who profit from the system in the first place. (Fight The Power!) It is going to come from the people who have been left out of it and they're going to say: enough! No, you cannot have our bauxite. You cannot have our rivers. You cannot have our mountains. Manage with what you've got! And when that begins to unfold, you know, there will be a domino effect and people will have to find different ways of managing. (Laura Flanders): It sounds like you're encouraging us all to go where the internal security threat is said to be. Well you know….we must all become internal security threats.
3.
Yes thanks largely to the war on drugs, a war that has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies have consistently shown that people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites, the war of drugs waged in these ghetto communities, has managed to brand as felons, millions of people of color for relatively minor nonviolent drug offenses. And once branded a felon they're ushered into a permanent second class status not unlike the one we supposedly left behind. Those labeled felons may be denied the right to vote, are automatically excluded from juries and may be legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, public assistance benefits, much like their grandparents or great grandparents may have been discriminated against....... During the Jim Crow era. During the Jim Crow era. That's right, the war on drugs contrary to popular belief was not declared in response to rising drug crime. Actually the war on drugs, the current drug war, was declared in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan at a time when drug crime was actually on the decline. A few years later crack cocaine hit the streets in poor communities of color across America and the Reagan administration hired staff to publicize crack babies, crack mothers, crack dealers in inner city communities in an effort to build public support and more funding and ensure funding for....... The new war that had been declared. The new war had been declared. But the drug war had relatively little to do with drug crime even from the outset. The drug war was launched in response to racial politics, not drug crime. The drug war was part of the Republican Party's grand strategy, often referred to as the southern strategy, in an effort to appeal to poor and working class white voters who were threatened by, felt vulnerable, threatened by the gains of the Civil Rights movement. Particularly desegregation, busing and affirmative action. And the Republican party found that it could get white working class poor Democrats to defect from the democratic New Deal coalition and join the Republican party through racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare and the strategy worked like a charm. Within weeks of the Reagan administration's publicity campaign around crack cocaine, images of black crack users and crack dealers flooded our nation's television sets and forever changed our nation's conception of who drug users and dealers are. And the law enforcement efforts became targeted on poor communities of color in....... The drug war. The drug war. Drug law enforcement agencies, state and local task forces committed to drug law enforcement have been rewarded for drastically increasing the volume of drug arrests. Many people think the drug war has been targeted at violent offenders or aimed at routing out drug kingpins but nothing can be further from the truth. Local and state law enforcement agencies get rewarded for the sheer numbers of drug arrests. And federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement officials to keep 80 percent of the cash, cars and homes that they seize from suspected drug offenders. Granting to law enforcement a direct monetary interest in the profitability and longevity in....... The drug war. The drug war.
4.
I always found when, in any discussion on war, inevitably in any discussion on war, at a certain point in the discussion somebody would say: "oh well...it's human nature." Well first of all, from my own experience...and I still have to tell this to people because there's still people who talk about a desire of young men to go to war, the thrill it is for young men to be at war, to shoot their guns...to kill. I thought about my own experience in the Air Force. It was very clear to me that, looking around at all these guys around me who are dropping bombs, who are killing people...that did not come from inside. It did not come from: "oh God! How good it would be to kill some people today!" No! It was no urge to kill even though they were the enemy...no, no. What it came from, is simply, we had been trained. (There's a war going on outside, no man is safe from.) And also we have been told that it's a good war. We've been told we're the good guys, they're the bad guys. It's bad if they won, it'd be good if we win, we gotta drop the bombs and so we'll do it and we'll do it as well as we can but there was no spontaneous urge to kill. My own personal experience simply recoiled at the idea that soldiers had this kind of killer instinct. And then when I got away from my own experiences and just began to study history, the history of wars, something else became clear to me and that is: wars don't take place out of the rush of a population demanding war. It isn't the population that demands war. It's the leaders who demand war and prepare the population for war. Well you have to do two things, really, in order to mobilize an army for war. You have to persuade them that this is a good thing to do, a noble thing to do. And you have to work very hard to persuade them because after all they're gonna risk their lives. So you have on the one hand, you have the propaganda campaign... (It's similar to Vietnam) And then on the other hand you have the coercion and the punishments. It takes in other words, powerful, powerful inducements and threats to mobilize the young population and the nation for war. And if you had a spontaneous urge for war, you wouldn't have to do that. It was clear to me from looking at wars through anthropology, there were some tribes that were fierce and some tribes that were peaceful. It clearly wasn't a universal quality. It depended on the conditions under which they lived. And also the word aggression is a very ambiguous term, because you can take out your aggressions in many ways. You don't have to take it out by killing people. And they're all subject to environmental circumstances. So to me what was clear was that, there was a very, very important political consequence of this belief in human nature as the basis for violence. (Tell them that it's human nature.....) Because the consequences of believing that war has come as a result of human nature, is to place the blame for wars on individual people and to take away the blame from the leaders of the nation who are driving the country into war.
5.
You know, the Democrats and Republicans aren’t a category. It’s not a sharp split. They’re two factions of the same party. We have a one party state with two somewhat different factions with a lot of overlap. What should you do in that case? Well like everything, it’s your own choice. Do you wanna live in a democratic society or do you wanna live in the society we have? Which remember, is not a democratic society and is not intended to be. It’s what’s called in the technical literature: a polyarchy. A polyarchy is a system in which power resides in the hands of those who Madison called the wealth of the nation, the responsible class of men. And the rest of the population is fragmented, distracted, allowed to participate every couple of years, they’re allowed to come and say: “yes, thank you. Why don’t you continue for another 4 years?” And they have little choice among the responsible men, the wealth of the nation. That’s the way the country was founded. It was founded on the principle explained by Madison in the Constitutional Convention that the primary goal of government is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. But that remains. It remains the elite ideal…and it’s a constant struggle. And most of the population is well aware of it. So for example take the November 2000 election. Nobody could understand why the public didn’t care. The public is a game among intellectuals. The public “just didn’t care.” So OK, the election was stolen, who cares? Why wasn’t it an issue? Attitudes in the United States are very carefully monitored. Business wants to know what people are thinking. In fact, most people voted against their own interests and consciously because they knew it didn’t matter much. They were supposed to vote on what are called qualities. Not issues. Like…do you like the guy? You know…do you wanna be with him or something like that. Do you want to have a drink with him in a bar or something like that. That was the issue in the election. And people didn’t even know where the candidate stood on issues. And it’s not because they’re stupid. It was extremely hard to figure out where they stood on issues and that they’re trained to make it hard. And in fact, most of the issues that the public cared about weren’t even allowed to come up. The major issues had to do with economic affairs. What’s misleadingly called globalization, the trade deficit, job security and things like that. You can’t bring those issues up in the elections. If you take a look at attitudes, there’s a very sharp split between elite opinion, which is strongly in favor of all of this stuff and public, which is strongly opposed to them. And therefor it can’t come up in the elections. So, what do you do? Well, you have to decide whether you want to live in a democratic society or not. If you want to live in the kind of society that say, Madison envisioned…ok that’s a choice, but certainly not necessary. Over the last couple hundred years there has been a very substantial extension of the right of the population to have the ability to participate and make a difference. It’s not overwhelming and it’s always a struggle to beat it back but it’s no reason why that can’t continue. And that’s the alternative. It’s not a matter of naming one party or another but just changing the whole framework in which politics persists, largely because of the extremely narrow concentration of economic power, which removes from the public arena most decisions that belong there. There’s a major effort underway right now to reduce it even further, but you don’t have to accept this.
6.
(George W Bush): On September 11, 2001 we were attacked in an unprovoked fashion. I really do think it is important to think about what we were talking about before September 11th, because it is an important measure of how much ground we've lost. And we were talking about empire. Not about one country's empire but about the global network of empire and identifying those institutions that advance it and lock it in. The World Trade Organization The International Monetary Fund The World Bank The Free Trade agreements. That's what we were going after. At times of crisis, at times when the world is shifting beneath our feet and people are panicked and focused on our daily emergencies, we wanna look for strong leaders. And you know, those can be leaders that we love like crazy, by the way. It isn't just this authoritarian leader phenomenon that we recognized in what happened after September 11th, in sort of trusting Bush and Cheney and Juliani. It's any desire to just be led in a child-like manner, any desire to project these Messianic powers onto political leaders. So I think we're seeing a more benign form of that. And when people are in a state of shock and when they're willing to delegate power to a small group of people that's a time when you can get things done very quickly if you have an unpopular agenda. Unlike these previous crises that have been exploited to advance this ideology, we understand that this crisis was created by that ideology. From a public relations perspective, that makes it much harder to use that crisis to push forth more privatization. But what we have been living is a counterrevolution, a revolt of the elite against the gains of The New Deal. It's been funded and driven by the entrusted elites who have benefited from it enormously. So, what can we be doing in the face of this? What would resistance look like? I think it is so much less about whether you have a government that you like or not, than whether that government is facing real pressure from below. But right now the pressure is coming from Wall Street, which is continuing to lobby despite the fact that it's now being paid for by taxpayers. And they continue to win victories defeating progressive legislation. So that's the dynamic that has to change. Ummm, I think this is a moment right now, where you have a crisis that is clearly sending us a message that the system is broken. And you have a dramatic electoral mandate to do something about it. If they nationalized the auto industry, they could have forced this deal through that had employee ownership. I think there should be a zero tolerance for factory closures. These factories could be turned into workers cooperatives. They could be brought into a real Green New Deal. Before any factory closes, there could be a green audit to see what sort of technological upgrades need to happen to transform an auto parts factory into a factory that can be making public transit, that can be making technology for wind and solar. And they should be subsidized for it and if the bosses don't wanna run that factory then the workers who are creditors in every single one of these cases, should be given the opportunity to run the factory for themselves. That's..........I'm gonna end there because I got applause, so good night.
7.
A system of legalized greed….they call that capitalism now. I think capitalism probably used to mean something else a long time ago. But right now it's a system that is really no better than any kind of ponzi scheme that guarantees that the very few at the top, in this case the richest one percent in America, have more financial wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined. The richest 1 percent is on top of that pyramid and they get everybody else in the rest of the pyramid thinking that if they just work hard, they can get to the top of the pyramid too someday. But of course there's only room for a few people at the top of that pyramid. I just don't think that if we're gonna call this a democracy, that we should allow the economy to be anything other than run democratically. You and I should have a say. Dollar dollar bill y'all! Dollar bills y'all! C'mon Now! Yeah, yeah! I wanna replace it with democracy. I want an economic system that is run with democratic principles and has a moral ethical core to it. When you say, “oh we get to elect our representatives”, well you and I know the truth of that. (For the love of money!) That hundreds of millions of dollars are spent every year on lobbying congress and you and I don't have that kind of money to spend on that, so the average person doesn't get to see the things they'd like to see happen. (For the love of money!) I'm saying we do not have a complete democracy, if the economy is not a democracy. You can't call it a democracy just because I get to vote every two or four years. There has to be democracy in the economy. There should be democracy in the work place. What's wrong with democracy? Why do these companies...hate America?! Dollar dollar bill y'all! Dollar bills y'all! C'mon Now! Yeah, yeah! What is it about America and our love of democracy, where they just go: "oh...that's not good. We think the one percent, the richest one percent should be calling all the shots. Should be buying the politicians. Making the decisions"? That's the kind of democracy they like, where the one percent control everything. (For the love of money!) It's not right, it's not fair, it's not American and it's not part of our Judeo-Christian ethic or whatever religion you belong to; Buddhism, Islam, all the great religions are opposed to the wealthy being in charge and letting the poor suffer as a result of that.
8.
For 30 years, the West has been backing dictatorships in Egypt. For 30 years they have been telling us that all is well in Egypt, that this is a moderate regime. This was and remains still now a brutal dictatorship, kept in power by the Egyptian military. Without military support internally, Mubarak could not have stayed in power. And the fact that military itself is now divided, with the Generals scurrying to Washington to get orders, but lots of junior officers and soldiers, fraternizing with the people…that was the decisive event of this mass uprising. Have no doubt; what the United Stated would like to do in Egypt is to replace Mubarak with a lesser known torturer: Suleiman. But we know Suleiman! We know that he’s in and out of London and Washington, talking to the intelligence agencies, helping them out, torturing people that they are a bit shy to torture in this country (Britain) or the United States or in Guantanamo. So the message of the comrades, the brothers and sisters in Tahir Square is very clear: no to Mubarak but no also to Suleiman! We want this entire regime to go! It is the West who has kept this regime going. There’s one rouge who still won’t understand what’s happening in the Middle East….Tony Blair- “Mubarak is a force for good!” Well we know what Tony Blair’s idea of good and evil is. Because he supported the killing of nearly a million people in Iraq so 200 compared to that is nothing! These are the politicians of the West! Shameless! Corrupt! Visionless! Incapable of doing anything when they see a genuine mass uprising, but deliberately trying to create fake uprisings in those parts of the world where the leaders don’t do their bidding. And have no doubt, that what is happening in Egypt today is also a response to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the crushing of Palestine! The western politicians who are now realizing that Mubarak is a dictator…have they forgotten Yemen? Where for the last 3 weeks there have been demonstrations every single day? Against a dictator who uses the fictitious presence of Al Qaeda to strengthen himself and his dictatorship? That is the democracy the Americans and their European puppets have been backing in The Yemen! That is what they’ve been doing in Egypt! And one mustn’t forget the fate of our Palestinian brothers and sisters, for whom we’ve been fighting now for many years as well. This mass movement that has arisen might have its ups and its downs but, one of the things that a post Mubarak government will have to do, is to end the siege of Gaza! They have lost in Egypt, as they did in Tunis, the fear of death. And when a people loses the fear of death, then no power in the world can defeat them.
9.
Let me speak very directly to this whole notion of what it is and what it isn't and how I arrived at it. As a social scientist one of the first things that I noticed was just the behavior towards the title...."Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome." There's just a visceral response in America when you say "the slave" is attached to anything. Those of you that are more familiar know that what I'm looking at is multi-generational trauma. Multi-generational trauma's not a new phenomenon. We've looked at other groups. We've looked at aboriginal folks in Australia, we've looked at indigenous natives, you know, we've looked at victims of holocaust. Why don't we get the push back there? So you see, this is symptomology, this is speaking to a bigger problem, it's a pathology associated with race in America. Truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues, so we have to tell the truth and we have to in turn, tell the children the truth. So the first truth is: the majority of the world is a world of color, this is undeniable. So as we look at who we are I think this becomes very important as a foundation piece: your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values and your values become your destiny and of course Ghandi is the one who said that. And it's so true, because there's a statement that says as we arrive at our self-construct, it says that "I am not who I think I am. And I am not who you think I am. I am who I think, that you think, that I am." So it becomes very important to find out what those people believe about who they are and hence who you are. This is taken from James Gilligan who is a psychiatrist who worked 25 years is prisons and essentially what James Gilligan asserted in his book on violence is that, it is the destruction of the culture that destroys the person. That it is as intrinsic as food is to the body as nourishment for the person, the human, the psyche. That is what he said after working with hardened murderers and rapists he said, what we have done in this country is we have deprived them of their sense of who they are. Racism is a system of advantage based on race and so what becomes important as we look at slavery, again, the second retort in terms of the pushback is: "well you know Joy, slavery is not a new institution. Lots of people had slaves, you know...the Romans had slaves....you know so, what's the big deal?" Well American chattel slavery was very, very different from most forms that preceded it. It differed in the way in which a person became a slave, the length of servitude, the treatment of slaves and most importantly, the way owners viewed them. Before the European slave trade began, most people who had became slaves became so as a result of war. Two societies went to war, winners enslaved the losers. That's not what American chattel slavery was based on. It was based on the notion of Aristotle: "the natural slave." And it was believed that Black people were somehow less human so now we're talking about dehumanization. And suggesting that never will you rise to the level of those who enslaved you. Whereas in other societies people became absorbed within that society, eventually married and found freedom. That was never to occur with people of African descent. I often talk about the foundation of our problems around race is based on cognitive dissonance. So the first thing that we have to understand was how could a people who deem themselves superior, moral, dignified, intelligent, civilized......engage in behaviors that are the antithesis of that. Because what we know about cognitive dissonance is that it doesn't settle well inside a person. So then how could a people, oppress and subjugate another group of people using the incorrect history that we have for 246 years, what 1619 the date that we were given for the ratification of the 13th amendment. We're talking about 246 years. How do you reconcile oppressing people for that long? Well here's a recipe: if ever you are to remove the dissonance, which you must do in order to function, the first thing you must do, number one, is justify your behavior. Number two is that you then have to relabel the people to justify your behavior, to fit the behavior towards them. So the very first fundamental contradiction was the constitution. The whole notion of democracy and freedom and at the same time having people enslaved and the absolute genocide of native people. How do you reconcile that? Be clear that in order for these years of subjugation, centuries of subjugation to occur, you had to have institutions that were complicit. Those of you that know what post traumatic stress disorder is....post traumatic stress disorder, is a disorder that occurs as the result of a single trauma. What we have to consider is, looking at that one singular event....we're not talking about one event, we're talking about a lifetime of trauma. It's not plausible that Black people escaped without that diagnosis. Now what are the symptoms? Think about this: exaggerated startle response, outbursts of anger, feeling of foreshortened future. Now start thinking about what has been folded in as cultural behavior: "What?! What you lookin' at?!" You start thinking about what is now adaptive social learning that has been transmitted because I may not have been broken but if my mama was broken, I didn't know her behavior was broken behavior. And there was nobody to come in and help treat us during slavery or after. Jim Crow was after slavery, the whole Klan was after slavery. Let's do the math: 246 years of trauma, no help, freed, no help, more trauma....we're amazing! But the bottom line is we gotta do this work. I believe that this is not an individual heal, this is really a group heal. I think for this country to heal, we all have to get involved in this. Every single person. Because all of us have been affected and infected by this thing. But it's still doable because remember, we have Ancestors whose shoulders we're standing on who saw 100 years of slavery behind them and 100 years in front of them and still joy came in the morning. So we can do this thing, we can do this thing. I read this parable, actually this proverb when I was in Africa and it says: "if you wish to go fast, go alone, but if you wish to go far, go together" and THAT is the notion of village. We have to engage, we have to become village again! We have to become community, you know? And I know that if we came this far, with no help, really....nobodies gonna tell me we don't have everything we need to move beyond this. When I went to Africa, I was traveling with 8 other African-American women, I often tell this story because it was really the transformation for me, in my work on Post Traumatic. This woman, she's walking towards me and she grabs me by the hand and she says: "I am from Lesotho. Lesotho is my home. If I leave Lesotho, Lesotho is still my home. Did you think we would forget you? We mourned Martin and we mourned Malcolm right there with you. You are African, 300 years from home. We just wondered, when you were coming back." Let the healing begin. Thank you so much.
10.
“…In light of the anti-cop rhetoric that has been sweeping the United States of America, fueled by this group, some of the vulgar vile vicious rhetoric that’s coming out, talking about killing cops, that’s just some of the nice stuff. Some of this stuff I can’t even say….” Black Lives Matter! Black Lives Matter! Black Lives Matter! Black Lives Matter! “Black Lives Matter first trended during the Ferguson Missouri protests in 2014 over the killing of an 18 year old Michael Brown Junior.” Black Lives Matter! Black Lives Matter! Black Lives Matter! Black Lives Matter! “…The radical group Black Lives Matter, not all that different than the Black Panther Movement., they both believe that America is a racist country where police actively target Blacks for oppression. Black Lives Matter now causing trouble…all over the country.” If We Don’t Get No Justice, They Don’t Get No Peace! If We Don’t Get No Justice, They Don’t Get No Peace! “…Major protests in several cities, one of those demonstrations prompted the busy 405 freeway to be shut down near the Manchester exit in Inglewood. And in Northern California, eight protesters were arrested, after they blocked the 101 freeway off ramp to the San Francisco International airport for nearly a half hour.” It Is Our Duty To Fight For Our Freedom! It Is Our Duty To Fight For Our Freedom! It Is Our Duty To Win! It Is Our Duty To Win! “…But in the popularity contest that is the race for the presidential nomination, Black Lives Matter issues are getting airtime.” “Black Lives Matter. And in 2016 so too will Black votes matter. Which means that this year’s crop of presidential contenders in both political parties area learning that they must contend with a growing influence of a social movement focused on creating accountability and equity, within the American criminal justice system.” No Justice, No Peace! No Racist Police! No Justice, No Peace! No Racist Police! “I think the reasons that organizers used the phrase Black Lives Matter was not because they were suggesting that nobody else’s lives matter rather, what they were suggesting was that there’s a specific problem that is happening in the African-American community, that’s not happening in other communities. And that is a legitimate issue that we’ve got to address. We as a society, particularly given our history, have to take this seriously. And one of the ways of avoiding the politics of this is and losing the moment is everybody just stepping back for a second and understanding that the African-American community is not just making this up, it’s not just something being politicized. It’s real. And there’s a history behind it. And we have to take it seriously. And it’s incumbent then on the activist to also take seriously the tough job the police have.” We Must Support Each Other! We Must Support Each Other! We Must Love Each Other! We Must Love Each Other!

about

An admitted progressive propaganda album meshing talks and speeches from progressive thinkers and activists with Hip-Hop instrumentals. The featured figures address issue of the past, present and future.

The album has been used in schools, universities, jails, as background music for dinner parties......wherever people are exercising their minds.

Socio-political fight music.

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released June 16, 2017

Produced, mixed and mastered by: R. Holman (Hyp)

Featuring:
M. Shea on electric and contra bass
C. Banks on violin
A. Oey on violin
R. Holman (Hyp) on harp

Assinyeola Music Publishing

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Hyp of Triple Ave/Subterraneanz/Exile Society Oakland, California

Hyp hails from the early 90's Boston-Roxbury MA Hip-Hop scene. First with his brothers as the group Exile Society, then on to a collective in Oakland CA with The Subterraneanz, and later with the group Triple Ave.
Hyp manages a program working with people returning to the community from Bay Area, CA jails and prisons. Now Hyp combines music and restorative justice as a path to liberation.
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