When I look back on my years of sighting up Rastafari, I see some uncomfortable truths.  
 
My embrace of Rasta was a soul decision for true. I knew that as a white person I had no desire to be affiliated in any way with the system of white supremacy that  holds my black sisters and brothers as less, and me, by virtue of my skin, as more.  
 
But in retrospect I have to see how I brought my white privilege right into Rasta along with me.  
 
I, like ones here, said, 'Well we all come from Africa so I am African too.' and 'I am a blackheart woman, black on the inside.'  
 
Which is all well and good to say. But too many white 'Rastas' seem to believe that to say it makes it so automatically. This is a folly.  
 
There is no doctrine one can adopt that automatically confers a 'get out of the bad-guy camp free card.' And that includes Rasta.  
 
White people, even ones of conscience and good intentions, are constantly trying to find ways to make themselves feel better about the system of equality from which they benefit.  
 
Putting on dreads and chanting Rastafari is one way many try.  
 
To truly come into one's cosmic blackness requires a level of ruthless self-examination that few whites are really willing to engage, since it means gaining an extensive knowledge of history and rooting out one by one every assumption based on white privilege.  
 
What we see here all the time is ones who come to tell us all that 'JAH has no colour', that 'Rasta means One Love', that race does not matter. And yet they say they are 'black on the inside'.  
 
These same people are most often unwilling to listen and learn from blacks, to study history, or to engage in their own lives the struggle to dismantle this system, instead believing that to 'chant down Babylon' all one has to do is stop combing and take up some exterior trappings and assume a victim mentality in relatiion to the system, saying, 'see how they persecute me for my beliefs. for my ganja. Now I am one of the sufferahs too.'  
 
This position has no integrity. White people have an 'elite' position on this planet, and each and every one of us benefits DIRECTLY from the system of white supremacy. How ridiculous it is for us to play victim.  
 
Our road is a much tougher one than we would like, especially since we are born to believe that all good things are supposed to come easy to us.  
 
Coming here to squabble with blacks about their 'right' to say they Rasta, instead of devoting their lives and their excess funds and excess leisure time to end this evil that pollutes the world. Whites who are aware have the absolute responsibility to educate other whites.  And that means, unfortunately, being among other whites probably more than they would like, having embraced this black philosophy.  
 
Rasta is not an exclusive club that insulates its members from the reality of the world as it is. Rasta is not ganja and dreadlocks and reggae shows and feelgood-ism.  This is not how matter is redeemed through spirit.  
 
Rasta is a call to a life of serious work. Our very privilege makes this a bitter pill for many. We don't like to work that hard.  
 
White people in general have a tendency to grab things from any spiritual tradition that feels good to them. Accepting Rasta does not automatically guarantee enlightenment or endarkenment or anything else.  
 
Too many 'white Rastas' see themselves as superior to other whites for having the good sense to reject racist and materialist ideologies. But that is simply false pride, and a continuation of the evil worldview that says ANYONE is superior. The whole point of this exercise we call life is to BE, not merely to REPRESENT. And out of that being, to DO.  

[The Jungle Book]

No Rogues Gallery of 19th Century racism would be complete without Rudyard Kipling’s  famous (or infamous) poem "The White Man’s Burden". Though best known today as the author of The Jungle Book and Just-So-Stories for children, Kipling was the great 19th century apologist for imperialism. In the poem one can see distilled  scientific racial theories: the recapitulationist ‘half devil and half child’, and the terrible ‘burden’ of ministering unto the dark doomed races of humanity.

The White Man's Burden
by Rudyard Kipling

First published in McClure's Magazine (Feb. 1899).

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captive's need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain,
To seek another's profit
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine,
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
(The end for others sought)
Watch sloth and heathen folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--
No iron rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go, make them with your living
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man's burden,
And reap his old reward--
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of those ye humor
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness.
By all ye will or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent sullen peoples
Shall weigh your God and you.

Take up the White Man's burden!
Have done with childish days--
The lightly-proffered laurel,
The easy ungrudged praise:
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers.

[S.A. Cartwright American physicianLouisiana Medical Association papers (1851)]

S.A. Cartwright American physician

Louisiana Medical Association papers (1851)

Identified a 'mental disease' called drapetomania among black slaves: 'the insane desire to run away'

  "When the unfortunate individual is subjected to punishment, he neither feels pain of any consequence...[nor] any unusual resentment more than stupid sulkiness. In some cases...there appears to be an almost total loss of feeling...
  The liver, skin, and kidneys should be stimulated to activity...to assist in decarbonizing the blood. The best means to stimulate the skin is, first, to have the patient well washed with warm water and soap; then to anoint it all over with oil, and to slap the oil in with a broad leather strap; then to put the patient to some hard kind of work in the open air and sunshine that will compel him to expand his lungs, as chopping wood, splitting rails, or sawing with the crosscut or whipsaw." (in Gould,71)

Paul Broca (1824-1880) Founded Anthropological Society of Paris 1859

Craniometry-measuring the skull and its contents-the premiere statistical method of 19th century anthropology.

(1861)

The great importance of craniometry has struck anthropologists with such force that many among us have neglected the other parts of our science in order to devote ourselves almost exclusively to the study of skulls...In such data, we hoped to find some information relevant to the intellectual value of the various human races." (in Gould,83)

Race and Gender:

  "In general, the brain is larger in mature adults than in the elderly. In men than in women, in eminent men than in men of mediocre talent, in superior races than in inferior races...Other things equal, there is a remarkable relationship between the development of intelligence and the volume of the brain." (in Gould,83)

from an encyclopedia article on anthropology: (1866)

  "A prognathus [forward jutting] face, more or less black color of the skin, wooly hair and intellectual and social inferiority are often associated, while more or less white skin, straight hair and an orthognathous [straight] face are the ordinary equipment of the highest groups in the human series,,,A group with black skin, wooly hair and a prognathous face has never been able to raise itself spontaneously to civilization." (in Gould,83-84)

A problem arose for Broca in that his own data did not bear the theory out: But all he did as in all of his career was to "shift criteria to work through good data to desired conclusions."

(1888 )

  "The man who fights for two or more in the struggle for existence, who has all the responsibility and the cares of tomorrow, who is constantly active in combating the environment and human rivals, needs more brain than the woman whom he must protect and nourish, than the sedentary woman, lacking any interior occupations, whose role is to raise children, love, and be passive." (in Gould,104)

Broca does not forget the ladies.

G. Herve,a colleague of Broca

(1881)

  "Men of the black races have a brain scarcely heavier than that of white women." (in Gould,103)

Frederick Farrar , Anglican priest, Dean of Canterbury,chaplain to Parlaiment.

The Aptitude of the Races (1866) a lecture before the British Ethnographical Society.

  "They are without a past and without a future, doomed, as races infinitely nobler have been before them, to a rapid, an entire, and perhaps for the highest destinies of mankind, an inevitable extinction.
  ...not out of all their teeming myriads have they produced one single man whose name is of the slightest importance to the history of our race. Were they all to be merged tomorrow in some great deluge, they would leave behind no other traces of their existence than their actual physical remains.
  And I call them irreclaimable savages...[because] so far as being influenced by civilization, they disappear from before the face of it as surely and as perceptibly as the snow retreats before the advancing line of sunbeams." (in Lindquist,135)

Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin, geographer, founder of differential psychology, pioneer of statistics, considered 'the leading intellect of his time' (Gould, 76-77)

  "...a blinding desire to place the study of human behavior into the constellation of the rigorous natural sciences." (19)

He coined the term 'eugenics"

"I have no patience with the hypothesis...that babies are born pretty much alike...It is in the most unqualified manner that I object to pretensions of natural equality." (mugu.com/galton)

  "The most merciful form of what I ventured to call 'eugenics' would consist in natality for the indications of superior strains and races, and in so favouring them that their progeny shall outnumber and gradually replace that of the old one." (19 )

Gustave Le Bon disciple of Broca, a founder of social psychology.
                                             
(1879)

"In the most intelligent races, as among the Parisians, there are a large number of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains. The inferiority is so obvious that no one can contest it for a moment; only its degree is worth discussion. All psychologists who have discussed the intelligence of women, as well as poets and novelists, recognize today that they represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man. They excel in fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason. Without doubt there exist some distinguished women, very superior to the average man, but there are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads; consequently, we may neglect them entirely." (in Gould,104-05)

E.D. Cope, America's leading paleontologist and evolutionary biologist.

(1887)

  "Two of the most prominent characters of the negro are those of immature stages of the Indo-European race in its characteristic types. The deficient calf is the character of infants at a very early age, but what is more important, the flattened bridge of the nose and shortened nasal cartilages are universally immature conditions of the same parts in the Indo-European...in some races-e.g. the Slavic-this undeveloped character persists later than in some others. The Greek nose, with its elevated bridge, coincides not only with aesthetic beauty, but with developmental perfection." (in Gould,116)

The assumption is of course that the adult white Northern European male is the standard by which all others must be compared, and ranked. The black African in all of these measures is at the lowest rung of the ladder, right alongside women.

  "Metaphysical characteristics [of women are}...very similar in essential nature to those which men exhibit at an early stage of development...The gentler sex is characterized by a greater impressibility...warmth of emotion, submission to its influence rather than that of logic; timidity and irregularity of action in the outer world. All these qualities belong to the male sex; as a general rule, at some period of life, though different individuals lose them at very various periods...Probably most men can recollect some very early period of their lives when the emotional nature predominated-a time when emotion at the sight of suffering was more easily stirred than in maturer years...Perhaps all men can remember a period of youth when they were hero-worshippers-when they felt the need of a stronger arm, and loved to look up to the powerful friend who could sympathize with and aid them. This is the 'woman stage' of character." (in Gould,117-118 )

Ernst Haekel German zoologist, a founder of Comparative Anatomy

His famous statement
"ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" means that a developing individual "passes through a series of stages representing adult ancestral forms in their correct order-an individual, in short, climbs its own family tree." (Gould,114)

The difference in races was 'proven' by 'recapitulationists' by demonstrating the 'underdevelopment' of women, blacks, and Southern Europeans.

D.G. Brinton American anthropologist

(1890)

  "The adult who retains the most numerous fetal, infantile or simian traits, is unquestionably inferior to him whose development has progressed beyond them...Measured by these criteria, the European or white race stands at the head of the list, the African or negroe at its foot...all parts of the body have been minutely scanned, measured and weighed, in order to erect a science of the comparative anatomy of the races." (in Gould,117)

G. Stanley Hall  'premier American psychologist.'

(1904)

  "This [the suicide rates of women] is one expression of a profound psychic difference between the sexes. Woman's body and soul is phyletically older and more primitive, while man is more modern, variable, and less conservative. Women are always inclined to preserve old customs and ways of thinking. Women prefer passive methods; to give themselves up to the power of elemental forces, as gravity, when they throw themselves from heights or take poison, in which methods of suicide they surpass man. Havelock Ellis thinks drowning is becoming more frequent, and that therein women are becoming more womanly." (in Gould,118 )

Paul Rohrbach

German Thought in the World (1912)

  "No false philanthropy or racial theory can convince sensible people that the preservation of a tribe of South African kaffirs...is more important to the future of mankind than the spread of the great European nations and the white race in general.
  Not until the native learns to produce anything of value in the service of the higher race, i.e. in the service of its and his own progress, does he gain any moral right to exist." (in Lindquist, 150-51)

Sources:

The Mismeasure of Man Stephen Jay Gould
Exterminate All the Brutes Sven Lindquist
Standarized Minds Peter Sacks

[Rogue's Gallery: The 'Science' of Racism]

Rogue's Gallery: The 'Science' of Racism

  Presented here are the theories and findings of the 'greatest' minds of 18th and 19th century Europe. It is important to remember that the assortment of naturalists, anatomists, paleontologists, physicians, anthropologists, and philosophers displayed here were far from being considered crackpots, and most are universally acknowledged even to this day as the pioneers of modern European and American scientific and philosophical thought.

With the onslaught of Europe's colonial conquests of America, Africa, and Asia, issues of morality naturally arose along with the staggering death tolls: It is estimated that 90-95 percent of the indigenous population of America was wiped out. Europeans were, after all, Christians first and foremost, and well into the Renaissance, the Roman Catholic Church was the ultimate spiritual and earthly power in Europe.

In the days of the Portuguese slave trade and the Spanish conquest of America, religious arguments were strenuously made to justify invasion, occupation, slavery, and slaughter.

Hearkening back to the Crusades, in 1554 Juan Gines de Sepulveda, physician, priest, and chaplain to Charles V of Spain, gives theological reasons for the 'just war' being fought against the 'Indians' in America. They are, he says, slaves by nature according to God's will. And the Bible is full of stories of what happens to unbelievers and idolators. The difference between Spaniards and Indians is the same as between male and female, or between male and monkey. Dominion is legitimate, and those who resist will be hunted down as the king hunts foxes.

With the advent of science as the great challenger to the hold of Christianity on Europe (and ironically this 'scientific revolution' was precipitated by the vast influence of the 'Moors', Arabic and African--the very ones this later science would relegate to the bottom of the evolutionary ladder), naturally a scientific justification for colonialism would be sought, as the Spanish conquerors gave way to the British, French, Belgians, Germans, and Americans. It was vastly important to the European self-image that they regard themselves as the ultimate moral force, bringing light to the savage darkness of the rest of the world.

They found that justification in the infant science of evolutionary biology, or rather they fashioned an evolutionary biology to assuage the conscience.

There is a single assumption that runs through all of 18th and 19th century science, a single mistaken assumption that accounts for all the measuring of skulls, the sketches that relegate Africans to the status of apes, the theories that would be laughable today if their results had not been so tragic, and did not still deeply affect scholarly thought, especially historiography, today.

It is the idea that there is more than one species of human.

With that idea firmly implanted, all else that follows makes its own ridiculous sort of sense.


            ROGUES GALLERY

William Petty, physician. Europe's first 'econometrician'.

The Scale of Creatures

(1676)

  "There seem to be several species even of human beings...I say that the Europeans do not only differ from the aforementioned Africans in color...but also...in natural manners and in the internal qualities of their minds." (in Lindquist, 100)

David Hume English philosopher of the Enlightenment

ca. 1776

  "I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences...Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen in so may countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are Negroe slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity, tho low people without education will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession. In Jamaica indeed they talk of one Negroe as a man of parts and learning; but 'tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly..." (Gould,41)

Charles White, English surgeon

An Account of the Regular Graduation in Man (1799) "The first extensively motivated and illustrated hierarchy of race" (Lindquist 100)

"Where shall we find unless in the European...that nobly arched head, containing such a quantity of brain...? Where that perpendicular face, the prominent nose and round, projecting chin?...Where the variety of features, and fulness of expression; those long, flowing , graceful ringlets; that majestic beard, those rosy cheeks and coral lips? Where that...noble gait? In what other quarter of the globe shall we find the blush that overspreads the soft features of the beautiful women of Europe, that emblem of modesty, of delicate feelings...where, except on the bosom of European woman, two such plump and snowy white hemispheres, tipt in vermillion?." (in Gould, 42, in Lindquist 100)

Georges Cuvier , hailed in France as 'the Aristotle of his age', founder of geology, paleontology, and modern anatomy,who shocked the European world with his observations of the massive and rapid die-outs of entire species. His ideas were used to create hierarchies of race, and to 'prove' that the 'black race' was on its way out. He divided human beings into three races: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid.

From the 16-volume The Animal Kingdom (1827-35)
       
With their protruding jaws and thick lips, "...The hordes belonging to this variant of human being ['the negroid race'] have always remained in a state of total barbarism." (in Lindquist, 99)

[Africans are] the most degraded of human races, whose form approaches that of the beast and whose intelligenceis nowhere great enough to arrive at regular government." (in Gould, 36)

Sir Charles Lyell- naturalist, conventionally accepted founder of modern geology, Charles Darwin's teacher.

Principles of Geology-the cause of extinction is species' inability to adapt to changes in environment

(1863)

"We human beings, Lyell says...have no reason to feel guilty because our progress exterminates animals and plants. In our defense, we can say that when we conquer the earth and defend our occupations by force, we are only doing what all species in nature do. Every species that has spread over a large area has in a similar way reduced or wholly eradicate other species and has to defend itself by fighting against intruding plants and animals. If the 'most insignificant and diminutive species ...have each slaughtered their thousands, why should not we, the lords of creation, do the same?'" (Lindquist, 117)

"The brain of the Bushman...leads toward the brain of the Simiadae
[monkeys]. This implies a connexion between want of intelligence and structured assimilation. Each race of Man has its place, like the inferior animals" (in Gould,36)

Charles Darwin- English Naturalist, 'father of evolution' recognized as the greatest scientist of the 19th century.

The Descent of Man (1871)

  'The improved and modified descendents of a species will generally cause the extinction of the parent-species." (in Lindquist, 106)

  "At some future date not very distant as measured in centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races." (in Lindquist,107)

Comte de Buffon, considered the greatest 18th century French Naturalist:.

ca. 1845

  "The most temperate climate lies between the 40th and 50th degree of latitude, and it produces the most handsome and beautiful men. It is from this climate that the ideas of the genuine color of mankind, and of the various ideas of beauty ought to be derived." (Gould,40)

Samuel George Morton, American.'The empiricist of polygeny"(polygenists argued that the human race was composed of several different species). He collected skulls, and set out to rank races by the size of their brains. He created a gallery of sketches and tables to prove that blacks were at the lowest rung of the evolutionary ladder.

ca. 1845

Gould's conclusion based on an examination of Morton's 'evidence'

  "Morton was convinced that variation in skull size recorded differential, innate mental ability. He never considered alternate hypotheses, though his own data almost cried out for a different interpretation. Morton never computed means by sex or stature, even when he recorded these data in his tabulations-as for Egyptian mummies. Had he computed the effect of stature, he would presumably have recognized that it explained all important differences in brain size among his groups. Negroids yielded a lower average than Caucasians among his Egyptian skulls because the Negroid sample contained a higher percentage of smaller-statured females, not because blacks are innately stupider. The Incas that he included in the Indian sample and the Hindus that he excluded from the Caucasian sample both possessed small brains as a consequence of small body size. Morton used an all-female sample of three Hottentots to support the stupidity of blacks, and an all-male sample of Englishmen to assert the superiority of whites." (Gould,68)

Robert Knox, English anatomist, studied with Couvier, his work was enormously influential, though he has no data to substantiate his conclusions.

The Races of Man: a fragment (1850) reveals racism at its actual moment of birth, not as conjecture, but presented as science.

"I feel disposed to think that there must be a physical and consequently, a psychological inferiority in the dark races generally...The texture of the brain is, I think, generally darker, and the white part more strongly fibrous, but I speak from extremely limited experience..." (in Lindquist,125)


  "The Saxon race will never tolerate them ['the dark races']-never amalgamate-never be at peace...The hottest actual war ever waged-the bloodiest of Napoleon's campaigns-is not equal to that now waging between our descendents in America and the dark races; it is a war of extermination...Now, the fate of all these nations must be the same, it results from the nature of their populations, and nothing can arrest it." (in Lindquist,127)

In other words because of their inherent inferiority they are already dying out. We are just helping them along. It could even be seen as a mercy.

'Mercy in a massacre', Captain Gordon Pim called it in a speech about the crushing of a rebellion in Jamaica. (in Lindquist,129-30)

Extermination becomes synonomous with natural selection

Louis Agassiz , Swiss/American. Enshrined to this day at Harvard with houses and a museum named after him, disciple of Cuvier, 'one of the fathers of the modern scientific tradition.'

from his article in The Christian Examiner (1850)

  "There are upon earth different races of men, inhabiting different parts of its surface, which have different physical characters; and this fact...presses upon us the obligation to settle the relative rank among these races, the relative value of the characters peculiar to each, in a scientific point of view...As philosophers it is our duty to look it in the face." (in Gould,46)

  "The indominable, courageous, proud Indian-in how very different a light he stands by the side of the submissive, obsequious, imitative negro, or by the side of the tricky, cunning, and cowardly Mongolian! Are not these facts indications that the different races do not rank upon one level in nature." (in Gould, 46)

And blacks are the bottom:
  "It seems to us to be mock-philanthropy and mock-philosophy to assume that all races have the same abilities, enjoy the same powers, and show the same natural dispositions...and that in consequence of this equality they are entitled to the same position in human society. History speaks here for itself...This compact continent of Africa exhibits a population which has been in constant intercourse with the white race, which has enjoyed the benefit of the example of the Egyptian civilization, of the Phoenician civilization, of the Roman civilization, of the Arab civilization...and nevertheless there has never been a regulated society of black men developed on that continent. Does not this indicate in this race a peculiar apathy, a peculiar indifference to the advantages afforded by civilized society?" (in Gould,47)

From a letter to his mother

  "...All the domestics in my hotel were men of color. I can scarcely expressed to you the painful impression that I received, especially since the feeling that they inspired in me is contrary to all our ideas about the confraternity of the human type, and the origin of our species. Nevertheless, I experienced pity at the sight of this degraded and degenerate race, and their lot inspired compassion in me in thinking that they are really men. Nonetheless, it is impossible for me to repress the feeling that they are not of the same blood as us. In seeing their black faces with their thick lips and grimacing teeth, the wool on their head, their bent knees, their elongated hands, their large curved nails, and especially the livid color of the palm of their hands, I could not take my eyes off their face in order to tell them to stay far away. And when they advanced that hideous hand towards my plate in order to serve me, I wished I were able to depart in order to eat a piece of bread elsewhere, rather than dine with such service. What unhappiness for the white race-to have tied their existence so closely with that of negroes in certain countries! God preserve us from such a contact!" (in Gould, 45)

Jahweh says to Mahweh
'I want to touch you.'
Mahweh reply
'I never will say no'
and so they go
never-ending engendering
rending and remembering.
She spreads herself before him
for she is ocean.
He sets her shimmering
for he is sun.
Together they are cloud, rain, thunder,
they rip the sky asunder -
She trembles,
mountains rise.
He growls,
fire crackles the air.
He plows her darkness
turns her over and over she cries
'You are my only lover!'
She bursts into fruit
his seed took root,
their sighs in synchrony
vibrate a higher frequency,
they rise entwined infinity sign
the fruitful vine,
ears prick up everywhere.
Jahweh laugh-there is song.
Mahweh kiss-there is bread.
Touch and taste all is fed
and begin again love without end

II
Jahweh speaks to Mahweh:
'It is good,'
and she reply, with lowered eye
'It is my love for you.'
Jahweh laugh, 'My bashful one
so brazen when I bed you!
I come to you again, again,
as on the night I wed you.
So it shall be for our children,
I consecrate them to you:
you shall be their Wisdom,
all of me that is knowable,
but they will pay your bride price too
lost tossing in your tangles
to pin you, to win you...'
Mahweh purr  'My darkness is
for you to prick,
my desire for you
knows no end. Husband,
make it so for them.
Let me stand at their gates
and call out the way.'
Jahweh, stern, 'Those will remember us who will.
Those who do not
will learn.'
'Ah a true Papa!' Mahweh tease.
I'll see to them meantime.
Now... touch me please.'
Jahweh plow Mahweh moist.
Buds pop on the vines.
Mahweh sprawl
receiving all
and the barrels burst
with wine.

Yemenja to Olukun:
I am the waves of the sea
but You are its depths.
It is You who accounts
for my fecundity.
You hold me up to the light
so that I sparkle.
When You are stern it is I who storms
and  I destroy many things.
When You come to me with joy
it is I who bestows,
yielding up treasures to the shores
of the human world.
You are the Source and the destination,
I the Love which shows the way.
It is You who makes me Mother,
all these babes to tend,
and You are the dark well I drink from,
so that Love has no end.
My breasts are never empty
for I sip from Your cup
and I am always beautiful
for it is You who makes me so.
You are known by many names,
but one is for my lips alone.
You are inside as I ride
astride You
from the first day to this,
You the throne.
Surrender is not for me to choose,
for there is nothing else.
I yield glad from my womb
again and again.
There is no end.

The hidden place
the space of shame
and pain
which has no name
no face,
benumbed, dull
and featureless.

A beast rears up
from the cave,
fears of years
furious tears
ancient suspicions confirmed.
You are ruined
and you will always
be left behind, alone.

You dream of the one
who will redeem you
reclaim you
name you
remember you.
And lo the dream is true
but as he reaches
to embrace you
you flee from him too.
It is all you know to do.

You you you.
For this hidden wound
has made you colossally selfish,
and you protect it with every tool
available to you.
But now you see you are protecting it
against its only possible redemption.

Because you are numb
you do not realize
you have been lifted beyond it
to a place in which
it has no power
to hold you.
Patience, child.
Let the truth work in you.
Truly, you can show this shame to him.
He knows what to do.

But he can’t without you.
This healing requires your presence
and your courage.
It is you who must choose to surrender.
You who must ask.
And know with certainty
that it is possible
to lay down your arms and come
even crawling on your knees
into the light.

Strange that you fight so hard to hold on
that you would fear paradise
and view it as a sacrifice.
Your stomach in a  twist,
resist, resist, resist.

Is it habitual,
comfortable,
this agony
the only home
you have ever known?

Your throat is tight with thirst
as the living water rushes
through you!
Crouched in darkness
as the light in-forms you!

Well little one,
what would you do?
It is time to embrace
your magnitude.

     I

In truth
there is no need
to speak of forgiveness.
In truth
is the will to live new.

I keep shouting
‘New wine, New wine’!
to remind myself
of the time.
It is a foot-stomping demand,
a cry of pure joy.

Some believe they must wait.
that suffering is the human condition
until redemption comes.
But there is only one way out of the old
and it is the new.
Rebuke those ideas
and drink from the cup
in front of you.

         II
O the things which I have carried
believing they were mine:
drinking from the musty dregs
when coursing through me
all the time
is the new wine.

The miles my heart has trudged
sore and heavy-laden,
the sludge I have waded through
thinking it led to el Dorado

when there was never anywhere
to go.
The gold is everywhere I look.
Can I bear the joy?
That seems the only question left
and a ridiculous one
at that.

We have spent these
many dark centuries
saying no and no:
What happens
when we say yes?
Don’t ask yes to what,
just say it and feel your mouth
stretch and smile.
‘No’ speaks to smallness
the furrowed brow
the pursed lips
of the severe schoolmistress.
Say yes to whatever comes
and unleash the true teaching,
for yes attracts only what is good.
However it may appear
you will look back one day
and see that this too was good.

The world is littered with the refuse
of all we have refused.
We throw up our hands
and cast away the cup.
What would you do
if you had the power?
Whatever it is, do it.
Because you do.
‘The few, the rich, the white’
provide an out for you.
You can just blame them.
They possess no more power than you
though everybody thinks they do.
What they choose to direct their power to
will reap its own reward,
as the corruption of intention
seals their fate.
These are not platitudes,
but the principles.
You can set your watch by them.
You can learn when to wait
and when to move.
The difference between creation
and destruction
is everything.
Worship creation only
and to destruction-nothing.
Like the wise bard said,
‘Nothing comes of nothing’

Yes of course we are creators,
seed and branch one with ‘God’ !
Is creation done,
and so all of this ‘His’ fault
and only ridiculous contortions
on ‘His’ part
can fix it?
Most choose to read the Bible this way
And one branch of that  seed is the KKK.

Everything we have thought or done or made
which is out of accord with love
is illusion anyway.
In illusion we believe matter to be master,
we have created hunger, want, and need
so intent are we on the illusion of separation
from the source of  our creation.

We do not choose to see unity
because we fear a loss of identity:
this race
this history
this intimate territory.
It feels safer this way
to stay small this way,
and this way we can say
‘Hey he or she or they
is what keeps me down.
But I will abide in patience
and rest in peace at the end
and this is how the righteous win.’

But the deal is done.
And we already win.
And peace and rest abide here.
Now.
And in fact we are not even asked
to give up our precious little sense of self,
but to allow it to expand
to its natural breadth,
doing what we never thought possible,
what we had only dreamed of doing before.

How can we fear losing ourselves in ‘God’
when we have always been just this lost?
Nothing that we are is unacceptable to ‘Him’,
or other than ‘Him.’

Do you see the difference this knowing makes?
You can live from your true Self
when you know.

We invented 'I’,
and ‘alone’.
These are fiction.
We are not ‘God’  as some believe
themselves to be,
a law unto ourselves,
some marvelous solitary wonder.
What is divine can only be comprehended
in  relation.
We are not little ‘gods’ who create.
We are creator and created
creating in creation!

Every truth you think you’ve wrested
in your great cleverness
has always been offered freely
with a loving hand.
No need to wrestle. Just rest
in the eternal caress.

And your ardor for justice
is not sacrificed, but justified
in this embrace.
You are not asked to go anyplace.
In this embrace
there exists no bitterness,
no blame.
You can be a ragamuffin roughneck still:
there’s as many ways to live in love,
from love,
as there are creatures who live.
You can still dance sexy
and make out like crazy
And do
unadvised
wild things.

[The moral degradation of white privilege.What happens when you approach life itself with a sense of entitlement, rather than a sense of awe?You get all the relationships wrong.With the natural world: its forces, its cycles, its creatures.With other people, places, and things.With your own self.]

The moral degradation of white privilege.

What happens when you approach life itself with a sense of entitlement, rather than a sense of awe?

You get all the relationships wrong.
With the natural world: its forces, its cycles, its creatures.
With other people, places, and things.
With your own self.

Since you feel you are entitled to all good things you can imagine,
you are constantly functioning with lesser or greater levels of disappointment. You do not treasure what you have, but always crave more.

Since you are probably aware of the comparative deprivation of many,
even if you make no conscious connection between their situation and yours, the natural injustice does affect you. You can make many choices here, from engaging in ‘charity’, to indulging hedonistically in things that stimulate your pleasure centers so you don’t have to think. Diversions and distractions keep you from focusing on the truth of our  situation.

In terms of natural law, ignorance is not an excuse. Just because you exist in the condition of privilege does not mean you exist outside of natural laws. Causes have effects, whether you are aware of them or not.

You may engage in rationalizations or justifications which all boil down to this: you are privileged, we are, because we deserve it, while others do not. Whether you bring forth religious justifications, nationalistic ones, historical ones that paint your people in a positive light as opposed to ‘them’, this engagement with illusion contaminates any efforts you may make to develop yourself, spiritually or otherwise.

In the realms of love and romance, your fantasy probably swirls around some variation of ‘happily ever after’, since this is what your sense of entitlement leads you to expect. If difficulties arise, you are unwilling to engage them. In fact, all efforts requiring time and patience are equally elusive: most often you want what you want and you want it now. This is the message being constantly beamed at you by the various media. All you desire is available to you. Now.

You are tied to matter, and this leaves you ignorant of the subtle treasures of heart and soul that lie beyond the realms of matter. Your things become idols. You covet them more and love them more than the truth.  You comfort and console yourself with them, for the state of misery you are in is real, and unbearable otherwise.

You expect to be welcomed with open arms wherever you go, and you react with surprise and anger when this is not so.

You may believe that  racial inequality is a thing of the past, and that the evils whites committed in the past have nothing to do with you now, or you may cite your own personal ancestry, and point out that your people had nothing to do with the past 500 years of slavery and oppression.

But injustice for many is injustice for all:  it cuts both ways. You did not choose to be white and to live in the West. You do not want this privilege, and yet it is yours. You are aware that in the present equation, pleasures for you mean pain for others. Well, no matter how you feel about it, until you move to do something about it,  real happiness will elude you. It doesn’t matter if this seems fair to you; this is simply how it is.

Further, it is impossible for you to be truly happy living with excess while others try to live without enough. You have to give it back. And not in the form of pity or mercy or charity, which are evil things as long as vast systems persist which maintain inequality. Charity is simply another one of those diversions that makes you feel good for a second but does nothing to address the disease in the long-run.

The way to give it back is not to run screaming away from the land of plenty and play poor in ‘the third world’ either. Another illusion, and simply dishonest.

The only thing to do is to devote your excess beyond what you need to live to activities which will dismantle this system of privilege. It is unnatural for people to work against their own interests, but white privilege is not in anybody’s interest.  If the purpose of life were to accumulate material possessions in such excess that others literally die so that you may possess them, that would be one thing. But no one really thinks that is our purpose here.

Our prevailing religion entreats us to ‘love another.’ It does not teach that we should love some more and others less. There is a profound personal price to be paid for hypocrisy. And thus agrees that same religion.

To benefit, willingly or not, from an immoral system of privilege taints everything in your life with immorality. This is monstrous, but it is true.

This is a  society of addiction, of violence, of abuse, of grotesque consumption. It maims and mangles everyone in it. Appearance becomes reality, because reality is unbearable for most.

Detachment does not look much different than attachment
To the unrefined eye.
The love poems still come. In fact they come more passionate.
They make greater claims. For with detachment from reptilian emotion,
Languorous crocodilian desire,
Arises the greater love, love beyond desire. Here is the heart’s true desire.
If ones only knew.
Love lifted out of matter, from grasping, from possession,
In essence is utterly possessed.
Romance, which in the realm of matter
Becomes obsession, torture,
In the realm of essence is free and glorious,
Romantic beyond imagination,
God and goddess dancing in the stars.
Only by letting go, often most painfully, of illusions one by one,
Can one possess truly what she desired all along:
The notes of the one sweetest song
And the silence between them,
An embrace that never ends.
The constant attentions of the Friend.

You
are the hidden waterfall
found after much walking,
the sweet scent arising
from my words
like subtlest spray.

You
are the Far Mosque,
the church not made by hands,
you
the promised land.

You
are a book
whose pages hold
secrets
forever known,
which call me
home.

You
are the
pure stillness
after the rain,
you
the cleansing shower.

You
are the fiery globe
of sun
at rising and setting,
awakening all
and putting all
to rest.

You are
the colors
of the day,
the dark
of the star-crusted
night.,
and you
are those pinpoints
of light.

I come to you naked
without pretense,
and you settle
every
jangling nerve,
you receive
every
half-formed
thought
and give it flesh.

You gather up
what is scattered
and reveal the pearl
perfected
through  years
of irritating grit.

You are
th the silence between
these words,
the emptiness
which contains
the world.

The Promised Land,
Zion,
Canaan,
land given by God to his 'chosen'.
This real estate agreement  apparently includes
the extermination of man woman child and dog
who wrongly occupy it:
'idolatry'-wrong god.
'race'-wrong skin.
Why they sacrifice a young girl,
or a king,
to make their crops grow.
And well human sacrifice is unethical.
This much they say they know.

Maybe 3000 years ago
the world could have borne
this variety of god,
a local mountain deity of storm and thunder,
a cheeky contender who took out anybody
in his way-but today?
And where did they get this story anyway?
From wise elders,
whom they were careful not to acknowledge,
and to add 3000 years of injury to insult,
they got the story wrong.

The Promised Land-
let me tell you all that is ever promised
to any of us,
this the truth which the elders taught:
that happy land
that milk and honey
that cream and nectar
is the reward for living in alignment
with the truth of What Is.
Integrity. Right conduct in right order.
Responsibility. Love for creation.
And thus sensibilities refine.
We clarify.
The Heavenly City
is our crown.
The essence of Love pours in,
and we rise out of matter
to meet it.
This is not a metaphor!
But physiological reality.
Hear me,
Zion is no earthly place.
Jerusalem is the reintegration,
the redemption of matter through spirit.
And ethical behavior
is the hallmark, the indicator,
the Sign
and the Seal.

This abomination of desolation
comes of the literalization of a story
grossly misunderstood.
The final Resurrection
for which certain ones wait
in expectation,
this establishment of the eternal Kingdom---
well, like the man said,
you must be born again.
born again not in him,
but in the truth of who you are.

Ones always choose the lesser over the greater.
Ones build a Temple
and say God lives there,
and pray to what looks bigger,
and reject their own magnitude.

Nobody with a history
of a thousand miliion murdered corpses
has a thing to say
to the world today.
The demands they make
are childish and laughable.
Who do they think they are?
That's just it-not a clue.

And meantime the truly humble
meek and righteous
lead the way, as they always do.
In this crazy funhouse hung with mirrors
it looks otherwise.

The promised land
of heart, of hand,
the rock planted beneath
and rising above the sinking, shifting sand,
has always been.
It will remain forever after
the irritating grit
is all blown away.
Even fools will have their day,
but eternity belongs to ones chosen
because they choose
to walk the walk to Zion,
beyond form or image,
perfectly empty,
perfectly full.

http://www.blackcommentator.com
 
"Our policy with respect to the continent of Africa at best has been a policy that is inconsistent and incoherent," said NAACP Executive Director Kweisi Mfume, in Miami Beach last weekend for the organization's annual convention. "We've looked away in many instances because Africa was not politically correct or politically cute."
 
Mr. Mfume is wrong. United States policy towards sub-Saharan Africa has been consistent since August of 1960, when President Eisenhower ordered his national security team to arrange the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. Congo had been nominally independent from Belgium for only two months, yet Eisenhower, far from looking away from Africa during his last months in office, was already embarked on a relentless policy of continental destabilization, one that has been fundamentally adhered to by every U.S. President that followed.  
 
U.S. policy in Africa is anything but "incoherent." Rather, too many of us have "looked away" from the clear pattern of U.S. behavior and intent – a ferocious, bipartisan determination to arrest African development at every opportunity and by all possible means – including the death of millions.  
 
War on African civil society
 
Belgians murdered Prime Minister Lumumba on January 17, 1961, no doubt with the collaboration of Eisenhower's men. Lumumba presented a danger to European and American domination of post-colonial Africa precisely because he was not a tribal figure, but a thoroughly Congolese politician, a man who sought to harness power through popular structures.  As such, Lumumba personified the threat of an awakened African civil society – the prerequisite for true independence and social development.  
 
A popular and long held belief among Africans and African Americans is that the prospect of continental (or even global) African "unity" is what terrifies Washington, London and Paris. We wish that were true. However, the neocolonial powers know they have nothing to worry about on that score, having begun the era of "independence" with a clear understanding among themselves that conditions for meaningful unity would not be allowed to develop. African civil society itself would be stunted, hounded, impoverished – rendered so fundamentally insecure that, even should "leaders" of African countries band together under banners of "unity," few could speak with the voice of the people. Only leaders of intact civil societies can unite with one another to any meaningful effect – all else is bombast, and frightens no one.
 
Tribalism is, indeed, a problem in Africa. For Americans and Europeans, it is an obsession – the game they have played since the Portuguese planted their first outposts at the mouths of African rivers in the 1400s. However, there are limits to the effectiveness of tribal manipulation. Many "tribes" are very large – nations, actually. Setting one tribal group against the other, while suppressing the social development of each, is a tricky business. The colonizer must not to allow the "favored" group to accrue, through privilege, sufficient social space to aspire to nationhood. In that event, the formerly favored group must be crushed by the colonizer's own military force – a brutish and costly business.  
 
These are generalities, and Africa is a big place. Numerous colonial powers at different times employed the full mix of coercion, manipulation, favoritism, and raw (including genocidal) force.
 
After World War Two, and for a host of reasons, the colonial arrangement had become untenable. Europeans would continue to engage in tribal manipulation in the new political environment, while the U.S. preferred bullets and bribes as it assumed overlord status among the imperialists. However, it was clear to the old masters – and especially to Washington – that the formal structures of independence would inevitably lead to the growth of dynamic civil societies that could impede the operations of multinational extraction corporations and agribusiness. Civil societies can become quite raucous and demanding, even in countries in which there are tribal divisions. Therefore, the process of African civil development had to be interrupted, not only in those new states that were economically valuable to Europe and the U.S., but in all of Africa, so that no healthy civil model might emerge. If this could be achieved, there would be no need to fear the actions of assembled heads of African states – an irrelevant gaggle of uniforms and suits, standing in for nations, but representing no coherent social force.
 
Assignment: crush the people
 
To thwart the growth of civil society in newly independent Africa, the imperialists turned to the Strong Men. It is probably more accurate to say that the imperialists invented the African Strong Man. Although both the neocolonial masters and the Strong Men themselves make a great fuss about indigenousness – albeit for somewhat different reasons – these characters arise from the twisted structures of colonialism. Their function is to smother civil society, to render the people helpless.
 
Joseph Desire Mobutu is the model of the African Strong Man. He was an American invention whose career is the purest expression of U.S. policy in Africa. With all due respect to the NAACP's Kweisi Mfume, there was nothing "inconsistent and incoherent" about Mobutu's nearly four decades of service to the United States. From the day in August, 1960 when Eisenhower ordered the death of Lumumba (Mobutu, Lumumba's treasonous chief of the army, deposed his Prime Minister the next month and collaborated directly in the murder) to his death from cancer in 1997, U.S. African policy was inextricably bound to the billionaire thief. It can be reasonably said that Mobutuism is U.S. African policy.
 
Mobutu and nine U.S. Presidents (Eisenhower through Clinton) utterly and mercilessly poisoned Africa, sending crippling convulsions through the continent, from which Africa may never recover. With borders on Angola, Zambia, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Sudan, the Central African Republic, and Congo (Brazzaville), and a land mass as large as the U.S. east of the Mississippi, Mobutu's Zaire was an incubator of never ending war, subversion, disease, corruption and, ultimately, social disruption so horrific as to challenge the Arab and European slave trade in destructive intensity.
 
Mobutu's reign began in the heyday of European soldiers of fortune, allies of his like "Mad Mike" Hoare. By the time of his death, more than 100 mercenary outfits operated in sub-Saharan Africa, safeguarding multinational corporations from the chaos that Mobutu and his American handlers labored so mightily to foment. So integral have mercenaries become to Africa, a number of Black governments depend on them for their own security, forsaking any real claim to national sovereignty. This, too, is the legacy of U.S. African policy. (American mercenary corporations garner an ever-increasing share of the business.)
 
Millions died in Zaire-Congo and neighboring states as a direct or indirect result of policies hatched in Washington and executed by Mobutu – and this, before the genocidal explosion in Rwanda in 1994, leading to an "African World War" fought on Congolese soil that has so far claimed at least 3 million more lives, belated victims of the policies dutifully carried out by America's African Strong Man.
 
Bush cultivates more Mobutus
 
For 43 years U.S. governments have empowered Strong Men to do their bidding in Africa. The geography and riches of Congo-Zaire allowed Mobutu to wreak continent-wide havoc on Washington's behalf, while growing fabulously rich. However, many lesser clients have been nurtured by successive U.S. governments, their names and crimes too numerous for this essay. They and Mobutu's outrages are the logical product of the neocolonialist program. The actors come and go, but the underlying design remains the same: to prevent the emergence of strong civil societies in Black Africa.
 
The Strong Man's job is to create weak civil societies. Weak and demoralized societies, supporting fragile states hitched to the fortunes of the Strong Man and his circle of pecking persons, pose little threat to foreign capital.
 
The African Strong Man model suits the purposes of European imperialists and the United States, perfectly. Their overarching concern– especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union – is for the multinational mineral and petroleum-extracting corporations – what Europeans and Americans are actually referring to when they speak of their "national interests" on the continent. Representing himself and a small base of supporters/dependents, the Strong Man can be counted on to bully civil society into steadily narrowing spaces, snuffing out all independent social formations, while at the same time stripping the society of the means to protect itself outside of his own, capricious machinery. The nation itself atrophies, or is stillborn, as in Congo. Where nations have not had the chance to take full root or have been deliberately stunted, the Strong Man wraps the thin reeds of sovereignty around himself, denying the people their means of connectedness to one another, except through him. The state is a private apparatus and – from the standpoint of civil society – there appears to be no nation, at all. The people act, accordingly – that is, they do not act as citizens of a nation.
 
Thus, the Strong Man's most valuable service to the foreign master is to retard and negate nationhood through constant assaults on civil society.
 
What is commonly described as American "neglect" of Africa is nothing of the kind. Over the course of the decades since the end of formal colonialism, the governments of the corporate headquarters countries have arrived at a consensus that a chaotic Africa, barely governed at all, in which civil societies are perpetually insecure, incapable of defending themselves much less the nation, is the least troublesome environment for Western purposes.  The extraction corporations in Africa feel most secure when the people of Africa are insecure.
 
In Congo and Liberia-Sierra Leone, this unspoken but operative policy has plunged whole populations into Hell on Earth. African Americans typically criticize the U.S. for failing to treat Black lives as valuable – in other words, Washington is accused of neglecting the carnage in Central and West Africa because of racism. The reality is far worse than that. American policy is designed to place Africans at the extremes of insecurity, in order to foreclose the possibility of civil societies taking root. This policy has always resulted in mass death. Moreover, the U.S. did not simply sit idly by while genocide swept Rwanda and "World War" wracked Congo. Instead, the American government initially thwarted a world response to the Rwandan holocaust, and has prolonged the carnage in Congo through its two client states, Uganda and Rwanda, which have methodically looted the wealth of the northeastern Congo while claiming – falsely, according to a report to the UN Security Council – to be protecting their own borders. Uganda's list of "proxy" Congolese ethnic armies reaches into every corner of Ituri province, where "combatants…have slaughtered some five thousand civilians in the last year because of their ethnic affiliation," according to a Human Rights Watch report. "But the combatants are armed and often directed by the governments of the DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo], Rwanda and Uganda." ("Ituri: Bloodiest Corner of the Congo," July 8.)
 
Zimbabwean officers have also plundered the country, but have been involved in far less killing in their role as protectors of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) government. Angola and Namibia also went to the Kinshasa regime's aid. The United Nations and African countries labored for five years to untangle the mix of belligerents – with only the most pro forma cooperation of the United States.
 
Prolonging "Africa's World War"
 
Had the U.S. wanted to end or at least scale down "Africa's World War," there is no doubt that Washington could have reined in Rwanda and Uganda, who received a steady stream of American military and economic assistance during the conflict. The Congolese (DRC) government, on the other hand, has suffered under severe sanctions from both the U.S. and the European Union.
 
It would have cost Washington far less than a billion dollars in bribes to quarantine "Africa's World War" – slush money for a super-power, and a fraction of the bribes Washington was willing to pay for favorable votes on Iraq at the UN. Instead, the U.S. provided aid to key combatants. That's not a lack of policy, nor is it indifference. In the larger scheme of things, Washington believed that prolonging a war that weakened and debased Africa was in its "national interest."
 
Uganda and Rwanda have reciprocated, shamelessly. "Recently Uganda publicly backed the U.S.-led attack on Iraq, defying the African position to endorse a UN-sanctioned war," reads the current message of the official State House website of President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni's government, in Kampala.
 
Rwanda's Ambassador to the U.S., Zac Nsenga, was even more obsequious when presenting his credentials at the U.S.  State Department, May 8:
 
"The Rwandan Government reaffirms its commitment to join forces with the United States and the free world to combat acts of terrorism wherever it rears its ugly head. The events of the 1994 Genocide and September 11th has taught us that we have to stand together as Nations to defeat these evil acts against humanity. For this very reason President Kagame stood firmly in support of the U.S. led attack on Iraq, not only to root out a terrorist dictator but also to free the people of Iraq."
 
Three million dead in Congo mean nothing when compared to two eager clients in the heart of Africa, who are more than willing to both defy "the African position" on Iraq and help keep Central Africa chaotic – Mobutu's old job.  
 
As for Charles Taylor, the Liberian Strong Man responsible for the death, dismemberment and displacement of hundreds of thousands in his own country and neighboring Sierra Leone – at the time of this writing, Bush was still playing games over whether Taylor should leave for Nigerian exile before or after an African peace keeping force arrives to secure the capital, Monrovia.  
 
Concerned American progressives debate what their positions should be if Bush sends significant U.S. forces to help pacify the country. He will not. If history is any judge, U.S. involvement on the ground in Liberia will be token, if any, and brief – just enough to show the flag. Had Washington desired stability for Liberia and its neighbors Sierra Leone, Guinea and the Ivory Coast, it would have eliminated Taylor years ago. He was allowed to live because he served U.S. policy, whether he knew that or not. Eternal warfare is the most effective way to smother civil society.
 
Americans may also one day learn this horrible lesson.
 
Reproduced from:
http://www.blackcommentator.com/50/50_cover_africa_pf.html