Happy Sankofa New Year!
26th December 2023 · 0 Comments
As the holiday season winds down and with it the spirit of giving, The Louisiana Weekly wishes everyone a great, prosperous, and happy New Year. As 2023 draws close, we offer our readers the gift of knowledge and history we’ll all need in a Sankofa New Year forever.
We are in a time of reckoning in the United States. We stand on the precipice of a world-altering decision: Is the U.S. going to be ruled by a dictator, or will democracy prevail?
It’s sad to think that Americans have reached a time when this choice is necessary, but here we are, and we must decide through the ballot what kind of government we want to run this country. Black people aren’t surprised; we’ve always struggled to enjoy the full benefits of democracy. We know marginalization, being denied economic opportunities, and being ignored.
Yet, we’ve risen to the challenges, and some have overcome adversity to rise to prominence, like Vice President Kamala Harris and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Katanji Brown Jackson, among others.
While too few of us have enjoyed a high quality of life, we are getting there. We are winning the fight over fair wages, fair redistricting maps, affordable housing, and other obstacles to the great American Dream.
Enter the white supremacists, white nationalists, evangelical Christians, extreme right-wing conservatives. Like the Ku Klux Klan of old, they are trying to reclaim the ‘Lost Cause.’ Like their Confederate ancestors, they will fight to the death to return America to a place where White is right and White minority rule is upheld.
They no longer wear the pompous gray uniforms of sedition and treason but suits and ties in elected offices, and their battlefield is the American courtroom.
Black Americans whose ancestors were brought here in chains, people whose ancestors immigrated from other continents, and people of color who want to immigrate here are under siege by those trying to violently and threateningly turn back the clock to make “America White Again.”
So, we are at a crossroads. What can and must those who want democracy do? We must commit to having a Sankofa New Year.
In the Ghanian tradition of Sankofa (“to retrieve” or “go back and get.” In Ghana’s Twi language, the word means “san” (return), “ko” (go), and “fa” (seek and take); we must arm ourselves with knowledge, own our narrative, call out those who follow Trump and other wanna-be dictators, locally, regionally, and nationally, fight them in the courts, and go to the polls and vote for democracy, freedom, and our constitutional rights.
We must form coalitions with like-minded people, no matter their race, color, or creed. We have but one enemy, fascism, and those who want to perpetuate and implement a fascist government in the land of the free and the brave.
If elected, Donald Trump will lead this country into a dictatorship and attack people of color, ban immigration of people of color, and strike down the American safety net inclusive of social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs that help the less fortunate.
Trump recently used Adolph Hitler’s words in a speech where he called immigrants “vermin” who are “poisoning” the blood of our country. Well, shades of miscegenation and Adolph Hitler’s racial purity theory.
Trump named several countries where he would ban immigration. “They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world. They’re pouring into our country.” Trump also praised dictators, Vladimir Putin, praised authoritarian leaders including Hungary’s Viktor Orban, China’s Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un – and called President Joe Biden a “threat to democracy.”
Trump is facing 91 criminal charges in four court cases, including charges stemming from his attempts to overthrow the 2020 presidential election, his handling of classified documents, and his role in the January 6, 2021, insurrection by his followers.
Under no circumstances should Trump be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office. Seventy-five million people voted for Trump in 2020, but Biden won by eight million votes. We must flood the ballot boxes and voting booths to elect the staunchest supporter of genuine democracy.
For those reasons and in the name of democracy and freedom and the spirit of Sankofa, we offer the following primer on fascism and comments by dictators and wanna-be dictator Donald Trump, who recently sounded the loudest, alarming threat to democracy spewed by any former president since Andrew Johnson: FASCISM
In his book “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018),” Jason Stanley defined fascism as “a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of humiliation brought on by supposed communists, Marxists and minorities and immigrants who are supposedly posing a threat to the character and the history of a nation” and that “The leader proposes that only he can solve it and all of his political opponents are enemies or traitors.”
Fascism (/fæzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement,[1][2][3] characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Encyclopedia Britannica Fascism: “extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in the natural social hierarchy and the rule of elites, and the desire to create a Volksgemeinschaft (German: “people’s community”), in which individual interests would be subordinated to the good of the nation.”
Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism,[7][8] fascism is placed on the far-right wing within the traditional left–right spectrum.
Italian fascism (Italian: fascismo italiano), also known as classical fascism or simply fascism, is the original fascist ideology developed in Italy by Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini. The doctrine is associated with a series of two political parties led by Benito Mussolini: the National Fascist Party (PNF), which ruled the Kingdom of Italy from 1922 until 1943, and the Republican Fascist Party (PFR), which ruled the Italian Social Republic from 1943 to 1945. Italian fascism is also associated with the post-war Italian Social Movement (MSI) and subsequent Italian neo-fascist movements.
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian dictator and journalist who founded and led the National Fascist Party (PNF). He was Prime Minister of Italy from the March on Rome in 1922 until his deposition in 1943, as well as “Duce” of Italian fascism from the establishment of the Italian Fasces of Combat in 1919 until his summary execution in 1945 by Italian partisans. Benito Mussolini first used the term in 1915.
Ultranationalism or extreme nationalism is an extreme form of nationalism in which a country asserts or maintains detrimental hegemony, supremacy, or other forms of control over other nations (usually through violent coercion) to pursue its specific interests.[1][2][3] Ultranational-ist entities have been associated with the engagement of political violence even during peacetime.[4] The belief system has also been cited as the inspiration for acts of organized mass murder in the context of international conflicts, with the Cambodian genocide being cited as an example.[5]
Xenophobia (from Ancient Greek: ξένος (xénos, ‘strange, foreign, alien’) and φόβος (phóbos, ‘fear’))[1] is the fear or dislike of anything which is perceived as being foreign or strange.[2][3][4] It is an expression based on the perception that a conflict exists between an in-group and an out-group. It may manifest itself in suspicion of one group’s activities by members of the other group, a desire to eliminate the presence of the group, which is the target of suspicion, and fear of losing national, ethnic, or racial identity.[5][6]
Although he was elected democratically in 1922, Mussolini only pretended to respect this form of governance briefly; within five years, Mussolini had established a dictatorship in Italy. When he allied his country with Germany at the advent of WWII, Italians were not too happy with his choice. He was even captured and imprisoned by the Italian government in 1943; Hitler’s troops freed him, however. From then on, he ruled over the German puppet state of the Italian Social Republic in northern Italy. That is until he met his brutal end in April of 1945.
Authoritarianism is a political system characterized by a controlling government rejecting democracy, human rights, and political plurality. It involves using central solid power to preserve the political status quo and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting.
The political scientist Juan Linz, in an influential[8] 1964 work, An Authoritarian Regime: Spain, defined authoritarianism as possessing four qualities:
1. Limited political pluralism is achieved with constraints on the legislature, political parties, and interest groups.
2. Political legitimacy is based on appeals to emotion and identification of the regime as a necessary evil to combat “easily recognizable societal problems, such as underdevelopment or insurgency.”
3. Minimal political mobilization and suppression of anti-regime activities.
4. Ill-defined executive powers, often vague and shifting, are used to extend the power of the executive.[9][10]
Kalu, Kalu N. (2019). A Functional Theory of Govern-ment, Law, and Institutions. Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 161–. ISBN 978-1-4985-8703-7. OCLC 1105988740.
“Nature is cruel; therefore, we are also entitled to be cruel. When I send the flower of German youth into the steel hail of the next war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious German blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin?” said Adolph Hitler.
The “ultimate goal must definitely be the removal of the Jews altogether,” Hitler said.
On September 16, 1919, Hitler issues his first written comment on the so-called Jewish Question.
In the statement, he defined the Jews as a race and not a religious community, characterized the effect of a Jewish presence as a “race-tuberculosis of the peoples,” and identified the initial goal of a German government to be discriminatory legislation against Jews. The “ultimate goal must definitely be the removal of the Jews altogether.”
Trump said immigrants were poisoning the blood of our country. Hitler used similar language about Jews “poison[ing] the blood of others” in “Mein Kampf,” his 1925 manifesto:
“Everything we admire on this earth today – science and art, technology and inventions – is only the creative product of a few peoples and originally perhaps of one race. … All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.
All the human culture, all the results of art, science, and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the product of the Aryan. … If we were to divide mankind into three groups, the founders of culture, the bearers of culture, and the destroyers of culture, only the Aryan could be considered as the representative of the first group. From him originate the foundations and walls of all human creation…. Hence, it is no accident that the first cultures arose in places where the Aryan, in his encounters with lower peoples, subjected them and bent them to his will.
As soon as the subjected people began to raise themselves up and probably approached the conqueror in language, the sharp dividing wall between master and servant fell. The Aryan gave up the purity of his blood, and … lost his cultural capacity, until at last, not only mentally but also physically, he began to resemble the subjected aborigines more than his own ancestors. Blood mixture and the resultant drop in racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures.
It was and it is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing it down from its cultural and political height, and himself rising to be its master. For a racially pure people which is conscious of its blood can never be enslaved by the Jew. In this world, he will forever be master over bastards and bastards alone. And so he tries systematically to lower the racial level by continuous poisoning of individuals.
“Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future,” said Hitler.
This article originally published in the December 18, 2023 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
