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mariacallous · 2 months ago

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On Oct. 22, Devlet Bahceli, the leader of the far right Turkey’s Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and a key ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, stunned the country by suggesting that Abdullah Ocalan—the leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Ocalan founded in 1978 and that has waged an insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984 and is listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey as well as the United States and the European Union—should be granted parole if he renounces violence and disbands the organization.

Ocalan has been serving a life sentence since 1999 on the prison island of Imrali, located to the south of Istanbul. Bahceli proposed that the leader of the PKK be given the opportunity to make this announcement in an address in the Turkish parliament directed to the pro-Kurdish, left-wing Peoples’ Equality and Democracy (DEM) Party.

The Kurdish political movement has a broad base among Turkey’s Kurds. In the 2023 parliamentary election, the Peoples’ Democracy Party (HDP)—the DEM Party’s predecessor— received just over 46 percent of the votes in the predominantly Kurdish provinces. However, like its earlier incarnations, the pro-Kurdish party largely remains in the shadow of the PKK. Presumably, Bahceli believes that the symbolic effect of Ocalan’s statement would be all the more profound if delivered to the political wing of the Kurdish movement. In that case, the legal obstacles to granting him parole would disappear, Bahceli said.

When the Turkish parliament reconvened on Oct. 1, Bahceli had unexpectedly shook hands with the lawmakers of the pro-Kurdish party. The far-right leader stressed the importance of national unity and brotherhood and said, “We are entering a new era, and when we call for peace in the world, we must also secure peace in our own country.”

By making these statements, Bahceli has assumed a role that is akin to that of South Africa’s F.W. de Klerk in the early 1990s. De Klerk was the president of South Africa from 1989 to 1994 and served as the last leader of the white minority National Party, which ruled the country brutally from 1948 to 1994 and institutionalized the system of apartheid that made nonwhite South Africans second-class citizens. The National Party also fought a series of wars against anti-colonial independence movements and attacked Black-led neighboring states that hosted exiled anti-apartheid leaders.

Yet de Klerk broke the taboos of Afrikaner nationalism by freeing anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela in 1990 and negotiating the transition to democracy.

The MHP also has a history marked by violence. Between 1975 and 1980, MHP activists—who were known alternatively as the Gray Wolves or Idealists —took to assassinating left-wing students, state officials, and intellectuals. In response, some left-wing groups also took up arms. The party’s leader, the former army colonel Alparslan Turkes was arrested when the military took power in a coup 1980, but he was later acquitted.

Turkes then softened his rhetoric, committing himself to nonviolence. The MHP’s transformation continued when Bahceli, an economics professor who was untainted by the party’s violent past, succeeded Turkes upon his death 1997. In 1999, Bahceli joined the government of the leftist Bulent Ecevit, the MHP’s arch-enemy in the 1970s, as deputy prime minister. Bahceli has since then played a key role at critical junctures in Turkey’s politics.

In 2000, Bahceli accepted a moratorium on the execution of Ocalan—who had been sentenced to death after he was captured in Nairobi, Kenya in February 1999 and extradited to Turkey. (The death sentence was commuted to a life imprisonment in 2002.)

In 2002, Bahceli precipitated the fall of Ecevit’s coalition government by calling for the snap election that brought the Islamic conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) to power; it has since ruled the country for more than 20 years. However, the MHP remained part of the opposition until 2016.

When the AKP government engaged in peace negotiations with Ocalan between 2013 and 2015, Bahceli denounced the peace process, saying that “there is no difference left between the AKP and the PKK.”

At that point, Turkey sought an agreement with the PKK because Ankara feared the effects of the empowerment of the Kurds in northern Syria, where the PKK-affiliated People’s Protection Units (known as the YPG) had established a de facto autonomous region in 2012. But in 2015, the fighting resumed when the PKK sought to subvert government control in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeastern region.

In 2016, when Erdogan’s erstwhile allies—the followers of the Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen—mounted a coup against Erdogan, Bahceli shifted course. The coup failed, but the Turkish state had been deeply fractured, and it was imperative to shore up its power and authority. With this in mind, Bahceli called on Erdogan to make a transition to a presidential system, and in 2018, the AKP and the MHP entered into a formal alliance that was crucial for the AKP.

Indeed, Erdogan owed his reelection in 2018 and 2023 to the support of Bahceli, and the AKP government retains parliamentary majority today thanks to the MHP. In the 2023 parliamentary election, the AKP won 268 seats of 600 seats, and the MHP won 50.

The partnership runs deep: Erdogan’s government has espoused the nationalism of the far right, and MHP officials now populate the state bureaucracy and the judiciary, where they have replaced the Gulenists after the attempted coup.

But the AKP’s dependency on the MHP and hard-line policies has cost the ruling party—which has been in steady electoral decline since 2018—the support of the Kurds, once an important part of the party’s base.

Today, both domestic political considerations and regional developments have compelled Erdogan’s government to reconsider its Kurdish policy. In a statement published on Oct. 22, the DEM Party assessed that “the encirclement of Iran in a ring of war has raised the possibility that the Kurdish people will play a decisive role.”

The pro-Kurdish party seems to believe—correctly—that the specter of ethnic violence is haunting the AKP-MHP regime, and that this is a revolutionary moment. The statement issued by the DEM assembly on Oct. 22 expressed hard-left militancy: “Our party believes that the real solution is to be expected not from the government, but that it will be made possible by organizing the joint struggle of Turkey’s labor and oppressed groups and peoples,” it read.

Bahceli believes that he had to take this initiative to prevent the loss of territory for Turkey, MHP deputy chairman Yasar Yildirim explained at a meeting on Nov. 17.

The republication on Oct. 14 by the pro-PKK daily Yeni Ozgur Politika of an old article by Ocalan, in which the PKK leader enjoins the Kurds to enter into an alliance with the United States and Israel against Turkey, Iran, and Syria, is sure to have confirmed and reinforced Turkish concerns. Indeed, such an alliance has already formed in northern Syria, where the PKK’s affiliates are armed and protected by the United States, to the consternation of Ankara.

And on Nov. 10, new Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said that the Kurdish people “are our natural ally.” Describing the Kurds as victims of Iranian and Turkish oppression, Saar argued that Israel “must reach out and strengthen our ties with them.”

The war and chaos in the Middle East have made the Turkish elite attentive to the need, in the words of Erdogan, to “fortify the home front” by defusing domestic ethnic tensions. But Erdogan could not risk antagonizing Bahceli and nationalist opinion. Neither could he realistically hope to succeed with a new opening to the Kurdish political movement without the sanction of the party that is the principal proponent of Turkish nationalism.

But like South Africa’s de Klerk in the early 1990s, Bahceli also has to contend with radical nationalists who cry treason. In response, Bahceli has exhorted the nationalist opposition to be realistic and finally come to grips with the Kurdish reality. He pointed out during a speech to the parliamentary group of the MHP in early November that keeping Ocalan incarcerated has not prevented the Kurdish voters from reelecting representatives to parliament who share his views.

For decades, the Turkish state refused to acknowledge the existence of the Kurds—claiming that they were ethnically Turkish, banning the Kurdish language, and forbidding other expressions of the Kurdish identity—and sought to assimilate them. The tolerance of ethnic and religious diversity that defined the Ottoman Empire has been anathema to contemporary Turkish nationalists.

But just as de Klerk renounced apartheid, Bahceli now appears to be repudiating Turkish ethnic supremacy. He has started praising Ottoman diversity: “The Ottoman Empire secured peace and security by keeping local cultures and ethnic groups together, and we can accomplish the same by following in their footsteps.”

Bahceli’s claim that the “Turkish nation has never sought assimilation (of others) during its history” is demonstrably false, but is nonetheless remarkable insofar as it rejects the nation-building strategy of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, who sought to assimilate Kurds and other Muslim, non-Turkish ethnic groups.

The Ataturk cult is an impediment to liberalization. When Turkish Armenian economist Daron Acemoglu, a Nobel laureate in economics this year, recently pointed out that Ataturk concentrated power into his hands when he instead could have built on the pluralistic legacy of the Ottoman Empire, Kemalist nationalists blasted him. A celebrity actor demanded that he “bow respectfully to the savior of the nation.”

Bahceli seems to hope that Ocalan can be Turkey’s interlocutor in the same way that Nelson Mandela was to de Klerk. Responding to Bahceli’s overture, Ocalan—in a message relayed by his nephew, who is also a DEM Party member of the Turkish parliament—said that “if the conditions arise, I possess the theoretical and practical strength to pull this process away from fighting and violence toward a legal and political platform.”

Yet it was immediately clear that such conditions have yet to arise.

On Oct. 23, the day after Bahceli raised the specter of Ocalan’s release, the PKK carried out a terrorist attack, for which the organization claimed responsibility, against a military-industrial complex outside Ankara, killing five civilians.

Bahceli may soon discover that Ocalan does not command authority in the same way Mandela did. However, Mandela was offered a similar conditional release deal in 1985, which he rejected. Ocalan may even be trying to mimic Mandela’s refusal. It wasn’t until after de Klerk freed him in 1990 that the African National Congress agreed to reconsider its commitment to armed struggle and eventually disband uMkhonto weSizwe, its military wing. Mandela refused to negotiate the use of force until political concessions were made, and Ocalan may do the same.

On Nov. 4, the Turkish state showed its teeth when three Kurdish mayors were removed from their offices and charged with abetting “terrorism.” One of them was the octogenarian Ahmet Turk, a veteran of Kurdish politics, who last year for the third time was elected the mayor of the city of Mardin with nearly 60 percent of the votes. Speaking on Nov. 5, Bahceli honored Turk as a “venerable Kurdish notable.” He implored the removed mayors to “patiently await the result of the judicial process.” Given the weight of MHP cadres in the judiciary, this suggests that the removals were not the last word.

Bahceli nonetheless then reiterated his invitation to Ocalan and held out the prospect of a comprehensive solution, adding that “as taboos are broken and people freely express their views, we can with small steps build confidence and advance from one agreement to another.”

De Klerk similarly said in a speech in 2020 that South Africa’s historic achievement of dismantling apartheid between 1990 and 1994 shows “that we can solve even the most intractable problems when we reach out to one another.”

But in South Africa, the geopolitical backdrop—which was as important for de Klerk as it is for Bahceli in Turkey today—was more favorable. The fall of the Berlin Wall three months before Mandela was freed and the general collapse of Soviet support for South Africa’s enemies along its borders meant that, as de Klerk pointed out in the same speech, that South Africa found itself in a position of relative strength that created a window of opportunity for negotiations.

In contrast, Turkey is mindful that the threats against it have increased, and the PKK and the DEM Party are becoming emboldened by the conflagration in the Middle East, believing that the Kurds across the region stand to benefit from the chaos and have little incentive to tame their aspirations.

Bahceli has shattered the taboos of Turkish nationalism. He has persisted in his overture to Ocalan even in the face of Kurdish militancy and terrorism, but it risks turning into a lost opportunity.

The Kurdish movement will only conclude that it is in its best interest to reciprocate Bahceli’s opening and engage in a confidence-building process with the Turkish state if the United States, whose support for the autonomous PKK region in Syria encourages Kurdish intransigence, decides to invest in a peaceful resolution of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict.

It’s in the interest of the United States that Turks and Kurds make common cause in Syria and beyond. The ball is in President-elect Donald Trump’s court.

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brookstonalmanac · 3 months ago

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Events 10.16 (before 1940)

456 – Ricimer defeats Avitus at Piacenza and becomes master of the Western Roman Empire. 690 – Empress Wu Zetian ascends to the throne of the Tang dynasty and proclaims herself ruler of the Chinese Empire. 912 – Abd ar-Rahman III becomes the eighth Emir of Córdoba. 955 – King Otto I defeats a Slavic revolt in what is now Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. 1311 – The Council of Vienne convenes for the first time. 1384 – Jadwiga is crowned King of Poland, although she is a woman. 1590 – Prince Gesualdo of Venosa murders his wife and her lover. 1736 – Mathematician William Whiston's predicted comet fails to strike the Earth. 1780 – American Revolutionary War: The British-led Royalton raid is the last Native American raid on New England. 1780 – The Great Hurricane of 1780 finishes after its sixth day, killing between 20,000 and 24,000 residents of the Lesser Antilles. 1793 – French Revolution: Queen Marie Antoinette is executed. 1793 – War of the First Coalition: French victory at the Battle of Wattignies forces Austria to raise the siege of Maubeuge. 1805 – War of the Third Coalition: Napoleon surrounds the Austrian army at Ulm. 1813 – The Sixth Coalition attacks Napoleon in the three-day Battle of Leipzig. 1817 – Italian explorer and archaeologist Giovanni Belzoni, uncovered the Tomb of Seti I in the Valley of the Kings. 1817 – Simón Bolívar sentences Manuel Piar to death for challenging the racial-caste in Venezuela. 1834 – Much of the ancient structure of the Palace of Westminster in London burns to the ground. 1836 – Great Trek: Afrikaner voortrekkers repulse a Matabele attack, but lose their livestock. 1841 – Queen's University is founded in the Province of Canada. 1843 – William Rowan Hamilton invents quaternions, a three-dimensional system of complex numbers. 1846 – William T. G. Morton administers ether anesthesia during a surgical operation. 1847 – The novel Jane Eyre is published in London. 1859 – John Brown leads a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. 1869 – The Cardiff Giant, one of the most famous American hoaxes, is "discovered". 1869 – Girton College, Cambridge is founded, becoming England's first residential college for women. 1875 – Brigham Young University is founded in Provo, Utah. 1882 – The Nickel Plate Railroad opens for business. 1905 – The Partition of Bengal in India takes place. 1909 – William Howard Taft and Porfirio Díaz hold the first summit between a U.S. and a Mexican president. They narrowly escape assassination. 1916 – Margaret Sanger opens the first family planning clinic in the United States. 1919 – Adolf Hitler delivers his first public address at a meeting of the German Workers' Party. 1923 – Walt Disney and his brother, Roy, found the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, today known as The Walt Disney Company. 1934 – Chinese Communists begin the Long March to escape Nationalist encirclement. 1939 – World War II: No. 603 Squadron RAF intercepts the first Luftwaffe raid on Britain.

#Events

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komododad1 · 2 years ago

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The South African Crisis (1960 - 1965) is a major Cold War crisis within the Black Sun continuity. It was one of the first major tests of the recently formed International Treaty Organization (ITO) in not only preventing the further spread of fascism but actively rolling back. It is widely considered a turning point on the African continent, after which the fascist imperial powers of Germany, Italy, and their respective allies and satellites were put solidly on the defensive in maintaining control over their sprawling and increasingly hostile possessions. ITO troops first entered South Africa in late summer 1960 under the banner of the ITO Operation in South Africa (ITOOSA) in order to stabilize the United Party government in the face of separatism by Nazi-backed right-wing Afrikaner nationalists of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB). As negotiations broke down, the AWB went on the offensive and ITOOSA shifted from a peacekeeping to a combat role in the ensuing years, with a mandate to put down the AWB rebellion. Despite Nazi military assistance, by the end of 1964 the AWB had been almost entirely defeated by ITOOSA - with its remnants having fled into friendly neighboring territories. The last ITOOSA troops would finally withdraw from South Africa in 1965.

#alternate history #alt history #furry #furry art #furries #KD's Art #Black Sun #ITO #ITOOSA #South African Crisis

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arcticdementor · 3 years ago

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By now, the spectacle that is South Africa’s insurrection has been dominating the attentions of just about every political junkie on twitter, drawing the best minds from every corner of the world to bear witness to the fall of the rainbow nation into a predictable quagmire of irresolvable chaos. At home, the pessimism comes in many flavours, and the denialism in many, many more.

The brute facts are now well-known. After dodging prosecution for extreme corruption for over a decade, the former president Jacob Zuma was finally arrested for the relatively minor charge of contempt of court, for not appearing when summoned. While he held out for several days as his supporters (who comprise about half the ruling party including several senior cabinet ministers) picketed outside his palatial compound (bought with the UK foreign aid budget of 2017) and blocked police from entering, he eventually handed himself in. So concluded a long factional battle between Ramaphosa and Zuma that claimed hundreds of lives in burned freight trucks, assassinated councillors, and billions of Rands in legal fees, patronage and PR. Or so it appeared.

On the 8th of July, the president disbanded the Umkhonto weSizwe Veterans Association, essentially the continuation of the old military wing of the ANC, and fiercely loyal to Jacob Zuma. The next day, together with assistance from elements within state intel and security, they deployed to major transport routes, food depots, retail outlets, police stations, power stations, water treatment plants, and ports, to shut down and burn what they could, crippling the Johannesburg-Durban trade artery that carries 65% of our trade volume and half our economic capacity.

After encouraging looting targeting white-owned businesses or “white monopoly capital”, the MK vets could watch as riots burst out to take advantage of the chaos and everything was stripped to the bone by opportunistic looters. In the shadows, organised and disorganised elements blurred together, as even the wealthiest elements of black society got in on the fun of looting, packing luxury sportscars with groceries and appliances before watching the flames tear down the shops and factories.

The police and the military did nothing, and the president was silent, paralysed. Soon the violence spread to the suburbs, and residents cobbled together militia to guard their homes. Proof of address was required to buy groceries. This received wails of agony from the press class and black social media. Slogans calling for the slaughter of Indians (who form a large minority in Durban) and whites became common, and soon the newspapers were joining in on the scapegoating, accusing the citizens’ militia of racism.

…

Everyone here saw this coming, but for decades now, it has been an unacceptable thing to do, to remark upon the inevitable future we find ourselves in. Why it came to all this, and why it matters to Americans and Europeans, is the point of this essay. It will be uneasy to stomach, but it must be swallowed. We live on the brink of barbarism, and the West is following us every step of the way.

A nation may have a lot of ruin in it, but a poor nation has less ruin in it than a wealthy one. When a state collapses or undergoes revolution in the distant reaches of Africa or Asia, there is a certain social distance which prevents Westerners directly apprehending the significance of the social dynamics, the closeness of the dangers, the universality of the lessons, the pain and the tragedy of the loss.

But South Africa is different. South Africa is at once Western and alien to Westerners. Our constitution is Western. Our revolutionaries and our reactionaries and our racial cosmology is Western. Our highest aspiration is that of the West at large – a universal state which recognises no difference of class, race, or creed. And that is why when we observe South Africa, we stare into the abyss of Western civilisation and its global future. Each Westerner sees himself reflected in that void, from the national-socialist, to the anarcho-communist, to the black-nationalist and the bleeding-heart liberal.

And they are right to.

…

Watching any graph of any indicator in South Africa sees every resource drying up, every indicator of health taking a nosedive, and the population booming beyond control, kept in check only by the enormous and perennial pandemic of AIDS and tuberculosis that take many times the number of victims supposedly taken by the SARS-CoV2 virus, every year. We are the rape capital of the world, have seen over half a million homicides since 1994, and the state has not replaced any of the infrastructure built by the Afrikaner nationalist government. The graphs just spell doom in their trend lines, and have for years now, as the Centre for Risk Analysis’s I-told-you-so’s often repeat.

When they came to power, the ruling party was a coalition of communists, black nationalists, organised criminals and common thugs. However, their patrons in the Soviet Union were disbanded, and the Western state apparatus was still composed of law-abiding institutions and competent civil servants. So they purged the minorities, and placed party members at all key posts throughout, to ensure ideological and partisan loyalty – this was called cadre deployment. This crippled the institutions. When the last of the old guard experts were ushered into the wilderness in 1998, they made several systematic departmental reports, which declared the need for replacing infrastructure immediately, to cope with the increased dependent population. This was ignored, largely because the experts were white.

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While many see the doom as setting in after 1994, it in fact began much sooner. The means by which the ANC gained power was not through civil disobedience, but through a long and sustained campaign of totalitarian violence called the Peoples War, which raged from 1979 until 1993. Black wage increases increased faster than white until this period (51.3% vs 3.8% since 1970), economic growth was over 5%, inequality was falling and blacks enjoyed the highest standard of living of any black population on the continent.

The addiction to cheap black labour meant that industry was irritated with state policies, and in the end, it was the local plutocrats like Harry Oppenheimer and the old secret societies like the Afrikaner Broederbond who opened secret negotiation to end apartheid. And while SA may have had a robust economy once, nothing survived the People’s War. It aimed to “make the country ungovernable”, and largely succeeded. Controlling migration from the black homelands became impossible, and maintaining law and order as the bodies piled up became harder and harder.

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But the liberal establishment could not bring themselves to believe there were systemic reasons for this state of affairs beyond “corruption” or “inequality”, and the struggle to blame the status quo on the previous regime became ever harder. So they blamed Zuma. The lost decade, they called it. So when Cyril Ramaphosa, a man largely blamed for the Marikana massacre, finally took the party leadership in 2017, after a long, expensive battle of assassination, bribery and skulduggery, he billed himself as a liberal reformer and anti-corruption campaigner, and the international community fell for it hook line and sinker, and local liberals worshipped him like the coming of a new Mandela. He promised the 4th Industrial Revolution. He promised the reigning in of BEE. The Economist endorsed him over the liberal DA.

But he was lying.

…

There are only three sources for non-socialist print media coverage of politics in South Africa. Politicsweb, where all the old senior analysts go when they become persona non grata, the Institute of Race Relations (a venerable old classic-liberal institute with a daily paper, the Daily Friend, and a consulting business, Centre for Risk Analysis), and Maroela Media, an Afrikaans-language publication run by Afriforum, the civil rights activist organisation which sprung from the Afrikaner-national Solidariteit movement.

Aside from this, every other publication leans further to the left than a man with his left leg blown off, and due to a hangover of apartheid-era Cold War politics, “left and right”, terms only applicable among the educated classes, roughly align with a black-vs-white friend-enemy distinction. The Mail & Guardian, for instance (indirectly owned by the Open Society Foundation), has refused to cover any rural homicide committed against a white victim in nearly a decade, despite a global magnifying glass being placed on the barbaric torture and murder spree that has slowly been smouldering across our rural hinterlands. When a white person commits a crime, it is milked dry every day until the journalists get carpal tunnel. But against the ocean of violent depravity committed by the racial majority, which has taken half a million lives since the fall of apartheid, we receive virtual silence. Swaziland, seeing the same kind of violent uprising as KwaZulu Natal is, is treated as a democratic revolution against a tyrannical absolute monarch, despite the opposition being mainly violent communists receiving support from South African parties like the EFF.

…

I was a communist when I was at university. I was delivered a faithful belief in progressivism, nonracialism, revolution and universal democracy, through the national curriculum in South Africa. I was introduced to Marx and Mill as an A Level student in the UK, and when I returned to my native country, I was exposed once more to the poverty and desperation and racial tensions. I assumed all the positions one would expect. More democracy, more repudiation of Christianity and white people, more redistribution, more socialism. But the political waters were calm in those days, and this was mere posturing. Then in 2015 my friends began a campaign to topple the statue of Cecil Rhodes overlooking Cape Town from the university his will founded.

#RhodesMustFall mushroomed rapidly, and became the romantic darling of not only us horny little revolutionaries, but leftists worldwide, who exported the new iconoclasm to Oxford and South Carolina. It is now remembered as #FeesMustFall, a campaign to make tertiary education free (for blacks). But I watched it grow from the inside, and partook in the occupation of admin buildings, touring other college protests in the Cape out of solidarity. But it became clear that it was first and foremost about racial hatred and the purging of Western influence, under their holy trinity of Steve Biko, Franz Fanon and Kimberlé Crenshaw – segregation, national-socialism and a metaphysical racial hierarchy, in new nation called Azania, synonymous with the basketcase fictional nation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Black Mischief.

This movement, while it began as nonracialist, soon became openly genocidal. Student leaders who called for genocide went unpunished, even praised by the VC of the University of Cape Town. This movement spread to every single university in the country, and despite prominent student leaders praising Adolf Hitler and calling for whites to be swept into the sea, singing genocidal songs at every protest, white students still offered themselves as human shields before police. Dining halls were segregated, classes were violently shut down, nonparticipants in some universities were beaten in their dormitories, staff were chased with buckwhips, buses were burned, paintings were burned, even security guards were burned, and more recently, so was the continent’s largest library. But no big newspaper offered moral criticism, just worries about whether the tactics were effective.

These young people defined a new era, and a new consensus – all struggles are one, and all are about black vs white, and whites must hand over everything and beg for their lives. The only lecturer in the entire country who stood up in public against this cultural revolution was the antinatalist philosopher David Benatar. All others kept their heads down, dithered, or joined the fray, calling for the heads of their less enthusiastic colleagues. Now the Fallists’ ideology is the official pedagogy of the entire university system. But this agitation had been the nature of political life at the poorer “bush colleges” for years now, just without the presence of minority students to trigger resentment or the ideas to build ideology: shut down every exam season to extract more lenient standards and increases in student grants.

And much like the explosion of violence seen at the national level today, South Africa’s poorer areas have been an unremitting hell for all those living in it below a certain class divide. 15% of all women are prostitutes, and the homicide rate is among the highest in the world, and some areas experience permanent civil war level violence. The old apartheid era town planning meant that black areas and minority areas were clearly separated, and this has meant a geographical buffer, where violent protest, which is again among the highest in the world, has largely left the middle classes out of it, even while it occasionally diverts traffic. Protests flare up constantly, as rival factions of the ANC, hamstrung by a corrupt internal promotions process and forbidden from dragging out dirty laundry in public, instead mobilise violent protests to contest wards and civil service posts, often burning down public infrastructure while the mob on the ground chants for “service delivery”.

…

Whatever else Nick Land writes, the lasting impact he had on me was in the very first essay at the opening of Fanged Noumena. He wrote it in 1989, when nobody beneath the highest reaches and darkest recesses of the Atlantic power structure had any awareness that South Africa was about to change forever.

Apartheid still seemed undefeatable to outsiders. The NP had recently smashed the heart of the ANC’s military campaign, creating a bloody hurting stalemate that observers at the time had no expectation would result in any pleasant outcome. Tens of thousands had already been massacred in the Peoples War to give the ANC a monopoly over the black liberation movements, but they seemed to be running out of steam. And so did Pretoria – influx from the Bantustans was unstaunchable, dependence on black labour was firm, and confidence in local cultural hegemony collapsed in 1976.

Nick Land, watching this, noticed something peculiar.

For the purposes of understanding the complex network of race, gender, and class oppressions that constitute our global modernity it is very rewarding to attend to the evolution of the apartheid policies of the South African regime, since apartheid is directed towards the construction of a microcosm of the neo-colonial order; a recapitulation of the world in miniature. The most basic aspiration of the Boer state is the dissociation of politics from economic relations, so that by means of 'Bantustans' or 'homelands' the black African population can be suspended in a condition of simultaneous political distance and economic proximity vis-a-vis the white metropolis. […] My contention in this paper is that the Third World as a whole is the product of a successful - although piecemeal and largely unconscious - 'Bantustan' policy on the part of the global Kapital metropolis.

…

When the British seized the Boer republics in 1900, they drew up the limits of control of the native African tribes where they already lived, and displaced a few thousand of them to tidy up the borders. These eventually became the Bantustans. Immediately, a long slow trickle of immigration was encouraged, not just from the Bantustans, but from British possessions in Asia. The migrant labour created a dense network of diffident ethnicities who demanded fences between them and their neighbours, while attempting to pursue economic exchange.

Black men, who could achieve far greater material wealth from working in the white economy than raising cattle and sorghum in the homelands, flowed steadily into white farmland areas and mining towns. In 1922, the South African Communist Party launched a general strike to demand the enforcement of a colour bar – “CPSA for a white South Africa!”. They were put down in a hail of gunfire by Jan Smuts, the architect of the unitary constitution, which allowed no devolved powers for regional self-governance.

Smuts was a member of Cecil Rhodes’s Round Table club, and shared Rhodes’s ambition to create a grand state where all literate English-speaking men and women south of the Zambezi would have the vote regardless of colour, and all the resources would belong to one grand cartel controlled by a British-American elite of enlightened natural aristocrats. Rhodes used money from his diamond empire and loans from Nathan Rothschild to fund the Jameson Raid and other means to instigate war with the Boer republics, which eventually resulted in the second Boer War and the creation of the Union of South Africa.

…

Smuts, architect of the Union of South Africa, also had a grand philosophy not unlike Nick Land’s – Land treats all matter and life as being ontologically the same, driven by “machinic desires” – all tendencies to motion and behaviour, whether in living or non-living material being fundamentally the same. All matter seeks more complex and integrated forms over time as a result of the force of entropy. Smuts’s grand philosophy, of which he wrote at length in Holism and Evolution, envisaged a means of looking at the world in which all of nature and society could be apprehended and governed as a single holistic system – all organisms, all cultures, all individuals, were destined to evolve into a greater whole, in which each part had its natural place, and that the common teleology of all matter and spirit was the global state, embodied in the League of Nations, the constitution of which he penned himself. Together with his extensive biological knowledge, Smuts and his London interlocutor Arthur Tansley gave birth to the modern systems theory of ecology, and hoped to see a central global technocracy overseeing a holistic ecological management system.

The aims of the United States since the Second World War have some remarkable similarities in approach. The post-war order saw the US employing a philosophy of “defence in depth,” controlling a defensive frontier from the China Sea in the East to the very edge of the Warsaw Pact countries, to ensure freedom of trade throughout this entire region. But this extended beyond military control. The use of embedded CIA operatives meant that those democratic representatives who resisted the grand plans of Atlanticism were swiftly dealt with under insidious operations like Gladio.

…

As these ideas bled into the old left, who were increasingly disillusioned from the failures of the Soviet Union. They turned, as Laclou and Mouffe did, to the notion of using sectional grievances to deconstruct the nation state, leading to the birth of intersectionalism under Kimberlé Crenshaw. The very foundations of nationhood and capitalist Christian civilisation could be toppled if only we united our struggles by leveraging our historical grievances, creating acrimonious divisions in the body politic on the basis of sex, sexuality, race and religion. Thus, the universal loyalties of the nation state that supposedly upheld capitalism would fall, and revolution would arise. This fell right into the plans of the American ruling class.

However, when the social morality of the postwar American colonial project in Europe met the plans of the military and the Malthusian tendencies of the RAND corporation, everything took on a far more ambitious character, with the help of a concept called “environmental security”. The first reference to ES in the sense of protecting the natural environment comes from the US EPA Technical Committee in 1971, as part of an ambitious attempt to quantitatively measure total social wellbeing. This EPA committee was the first to make environmental regulation part of a comprehensive plan for social wellbeing, driven by Holism and cybernetic ecology. They were exceeded in scope by the UN’s 1972 Stockholm Conference, where the idea of “comprehensive” (today, “human”) security emerged, and further, the Palme, Brundtland and Brandt Reports.

…

Under these new umbrella concepts came “human security” and environmental security, the Social Sciences Department of UNESCO and the SSRC found the unifying principles and programs they had sought since the 1950s, and pushed a proselytising program grounded in cross-discipline application of avant-garde ideas to seek “new ways of knowing”, promoting not scientific objectivity, but a synthesis of diverse perspectives. A wholesale transformation of the rules and discipline of social sciences followed, in service of global governance (see the works of Perrin Selcer).

UNESCO even deliberately set about creating a new world religion, in the words of its founder Julian Huxley, and formed the United Religions Initiative, to mould the world’s spiritual beliefs in line with international Anglo progressivism. Feminism and sexual libertinism formed a crowbar against the community cohesion that couldn’t be attacked by means of anti-nationalism, and into this soup of value inversions (erosion of disciplinary distinction, inter-subjectivity [i.e., truth-by-consensus over objectivity], and utopian welfare ideals like “freedom from fear”; “freedom from want”), dropped three wonder pills: Poststructuralism, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Global Warming. Now the great power-narratives of the Atlantic empire were consolidated – Malthus-by-proxy, anti-traditionalism, international diversity-and-inclusion, and the free-trade, open-borders paradigm of the 90’s.

In the same moment as de Klerk gave up on apartheid, the West gave up on the nation state, and handed control to the internationalists, under hegemony of the Atlantic community. A new empire was being consolidated from the territories captured by the Allies in WWII. Thirty years later it is becoming transparent – the new centralised global tax regime has cemented it. Just as the ANC funds the influx of black voters into urban minority areas to build shacks on squatted land, the West welcomes mass migration from the third world, total open-borders, to transform the electoral system against the interests of the native population who might have their own desires, against the grain of global empire. Every corporation and state in the Western world discriminated against whites in hiring. The CIA peddles Critical Race Theory and actively recruits sexual minorities. Colour revolutions can be spotted whenever the rainbow flag or black fist makes an appearance.

Today, the Democratic Party in the US openly looks to South Africa for inspiration in dealing with what Yarvin called the “outer party” – all conservatives are being purged from every institution, in a vast cadre deployment program to ensure the core of the establishment becomes forever untouchable. On the streets they have even begun to use the same tactics for control – deploying huge mobs to destabilise cities when election season is approaching.

Minimum wage rises funnel employment into companies in public-private partnerships with the state, like Amazon, who is part of the Enduring Security Framework partnership of the CIA (which includes Facebook and Google). The analogies between their experimental management strategies and collectivised central-planning are no accident – any company that aims for a total retail monopoly through state-subsidised negative-profit growth is merely another route to total control.

And as the nation and the state are decoupled, the liberal-democratic institutions are being geared toward the concentration of power and wealth, and a strategy of divide-and-rule, to create a cannibal economy. Only a few, like Denmark, have realised what they have gotten themselves into.

…

Much as Aristotle said, a democracy can only function beneficially when steered by the middle class, as it was in Rhodesia and the old Cape, which restricted the vote to property-owners of all races. The middle class’s needs are the core of the productive community, and as Marx observed, they are loyal to the requirements of productive industry and local trade. With the combination of the proliferation of the welfare state and globalisation, the middle class has been whittled away in the West, just as it has here in southern Africa.

Reliance on the state for services means they can’t be sacrificed – in the UK, the NHS has become essentially a religious cult, feeding the civil service, medical contractors, immigrants and the poor alike, in a financially unsustainable way, for decreasing returns. As Philip Bagus observed, the democratic pressures to maintain institutional support via this sort of patronage forces modern western states to take on ever more debt and expand taxation to the limits. This then must be offset by QE, which must be guaranteed by the central state at a rate that benefits the most fragile provinces of any empire so that the whole system does not collapse.

…

What Robert Mugabe did was pursue the universal extension of a first-world welfare state to every peasant in the hinterland, praised by the global left. This required taking on an enormous amount of national debt. Once the IMF tried to impose austerity, Mugabe found this politically unsustainable – his support depended on the handouts, corrupt and legitimate, that he was delivering. So he had to switch to printing money to pay the debts. When inflation became too much to handle, they replaced the core of the economy with dollars, and only elites could survive, much like Venezuela today. As the national treasury ran dry, the military and the civil service became restless. To placate them, they were fed the farms and businesses of the remaining white minority, as well as many areas formerly occupied by black peasants. The state had to cannibalise itself to sustain the predatory ruling class.

During this time, Mugabe attempted to control every aspect of the environment and economy through price and capital controls, suffocating every aspect of social life with red tape. It only accelerated the process. While the vast global network of UN subsidiaries extract compliance from the US client states

In South Africa today, the state coffers are empty. Even the ruling party is feeling it, as their headquarters Luthuli House was attached by the court to pay for a crooked PR contract they refused to deliver on. We have since taken out an IMF bailout, which is being poured into infrastructure, mostly Durban’s port, which is now choked by smoke and looting. Our president’s advisors are pushing for land reform, and remarkably, one of them, Ruth Hall, was advising Robert Mugabe how to liquidate his pale kulaks back in 2002. Other advisors, like Thembeka Ngcukaitobi, call for the fulfilment of the genocidal prophecy of Makhanda, and have whites deprived of all land and all moveable and liquid assets. This is deliberate Zimbabwefication.

The same economic dynamics are present in the world at large – the share of GDP spent on welfare keep increasing, as does the debt-GDP ratio. Capital formation has been falling for decades, and chronic inflation is treated as a static phenomenon, which nobody dares reign in, because the entire system is dependent on low interest rates to keep the constant corrosive consolidation of the global market going full steam ahead. This arrangement results in the inflation of property prices as along term hedge against inflation which, when the plebs followed suit resulted in the 2008 bubble, when they tried to play the elites’ asset accumulation game with borrowed money.

…

What has America been doing these past 18 months? It has been printing money so fast that it has kept pace with the plummenting Rand, and allowed Cyril Ramaphosa to tell investors that his economy is relatively strong – the Rand has “stabilised”. Error of parallax. Nor is it even just America printing money. While they certainly can afford to, as the holders of the world’s reserve currency, China is attempting to do the same, only they are directly funnelling the cash into commodities, rather than spreading it around a financial elite over which they have minimal control.

And yet their leverage is far worse than America’s – Kyle Bass, who has been shorting the Chinese market for years now, insists that the historically unprecedented levels of leverage in the Chinese economy are unsustainable, and that they cannot, even under miracle conditions, correct their shrinking population trends sufficiently to turn this ship around. But what many forsee in dreams of revolution and revolt, the breakups of massive crumbling empires, is not going to happen as they hope.

Instead, the state will protect the stability of the ruling class and its control over the levers of power at the core, bleeding everyone dry and terrorising them into submission. What happened to Zimbabwe is a warning, but it only happened the way it did because half the population could leave and send home remittances. The iron fist of a “democratic” government capable of rigging its elections and gagging the press and the courts is only as tyrannical as the cost of a bus ticket to the next country. After 900-member Zoom calls and election “fortification”, I shouldn’t need to gild the lily any more.

As many observers of China remark, an economic collapse of a country of its nature will not result in a breakup or a massive reform, but in the shrink-wrap tyranny of North Korea, an eternal sclerotic stagnation, fed by government dependency, held in place by state security. The West is losing control of its ability to provide the kind of total state security required for this however, and has been reaching for a far more sinister method of control – the financial system.

And this is where all analogies break down, because what is about to happen here is unprecedented. The international Bank of Settlements has recently announced that they intend to use Central Bank Digital Currency to control the spending of all global citizens, and have the tech and the power to control each and every expenditure, and to shut anybody out of the ability to feed themselves if they so choose. But this movement to kick away the ladder and consolidate total control follows the same logic as Zimbabwe’s – the poor can only be fed for so long, but the ruling elite must be fed forever, or else the whole house comes down.

…

The twin systems of China and Atlantis are both attempting to consolidate total control over their economic and social environment. And in order to achieve the kind of reforms that he wishes to, Ramaphosa has reached for the help of both power blocs. China has colonised our northernmost province, and receives special treatment from law enforcement that must learn Mandarin. Chinese are registered as black, to benefit from the racial privileges blacks enjoy under Black Economic Empowerment. While the government’s reports usually look like a dog’s breakfast, their reports on the UN sustainable development goals are always crisp, professional, and detailed. SDG 10 justifies the expropriation of property, according to their logic.

…

The erosion of the middle class, the working class, the institutions of law and order and even the substance of the informal economy was dry tinder to the Zuma-faction’s firebrands. To fulfil his mandate to end corruption, Ramaphosa had begun prosecutions proceedings into the Zuma faction – tentatively of course, since any too-wide-ranging investigation would unearth the corruption of all. But lawfare isn’t enough. They were cut out of party patronage systems as big figures like Ace Magashule were expelled from the party. Judges ruled that the state would not cover their defence costs anymore.

When the Umkhonto we Sizwe veterans association was disbanded and cut off from “pension” money, they finally put into action something that they would have had up their sleeve for months. Police armaments caches had been going missing for months. Firearms training for youths had been going on at the local branches for years. Every storage depot and major highway was targeted, petrol stations, power stations, water treatment plants were hit. They needed to make the country ungovernable, and they did. But this time they didn’t have the support of the Swedish, the Russians or anybody else.

Complicit elements are even inside the SSA, our central intelligence agency. What it will take for Ramaphosa to clear the state and party of seditious elements will give him the power of a modern dictator, cheered on my the press and everybody else, who despises Zuma and his people for what they’ve wreaked upon us. But with three months left of military deployment, all of the military capacity in one province, and the president fearing wielding lethal force on black mobs for fear of his Marikana ghosts coming back to haunt him, the rebels have three months to decide whether to act.

That leaves three months to see whether we become a black-nationalist disctatorship, or a new Yugoslavia. The Zulu, who form the backbone of the rebellion, have cheered for Zulu independence before, though their forces are split – the Zulu nationalist/traditionalist party the IFP have stood firmly against this chaos. Zuma’s people are still pushing black identity over tribal. Zuma may have been a traditionalist, a defender of the Swazi royal house when in crisis, an expander of chieftains’ rights, but his time in head of the ANC death squads in Zululand in the 1990s makes Zulu solidarity impossible.

So chaos it is.

#robert duigan #substack #read the whole thing #south africa

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zayaanhashistory · 2 years ago

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Apartheid

Apartheid, or “apartness” in the language of Afrikaans, was a system of legislation that upheld segregation against non-white citizens of South Africa. After the National Party gained power in South Africa in 1948, its all-white government immediately began enforcing existing policies of racial segregation. Under apartheid, nonwhite South Africans—a majority of the population—were forced to live in separate areas from whites and use separate public facilities. Contact between the two groups was limited. Despite strong and consistent opposition to apartheid within and outside of South Africa, its laws remained in effect for the better part of 50 years. In 1991, the government of President F.W. de Klerk began to repeal most of the legislation that provided the basis for apartheid.

Racial segregation and white supremacy had become central aspects of South African policy long before apartheid began. The controversial 1913 Land Act, passed three years after South Africa gained its independence, marked the beginning of territorial segregation by forcing Black Africans to live in reserves and making it illegal for them to work as sharecroppers. Opponents of the Land Act formed the South African National Native Congress, which would become the African National Congress (ANC). Did you know? ANC leader Nelson Mandela, released from prison in February 1990, worked closely with President F.W. de Klerk's government to draw up a new constitution for South Africa. After both sides made concessions, they reached agreement in 1993, and would share the Nobel Peace Prize that year for their efforts.

The Great Depression and World War II brought increasing economic woes to South Africa, and convinced the government to strengthen its policies of racial segregation. In 1948, the Afrikaner National Party won the general election under the slogan “apartheid” (literally “apartness”). Their goal was not only to separate South Africa’s white minority from its non-white majority, but also to separate non-whites from each other, and to divide black South Africans along tribal lines in order to decrease their political power. The Population Registration Act of 1950 provided the basic framework for apartheid by classifying all South Africans by race, including Bantu (Black Africans), Coloured (mixed race) and white.

A fourth category, Asian (meaning Indian and Pakistani) was later added. In some cases, the legislation split families; a parent could be classified as white, while their children were classified as colored. A series of Land Acts set aside more than 80 percent of the country’s land for the white minority, and “pass laws” required non-whites to carry documents authorizing their presence in restricted areas. In order to limit contact between the races, the government established separate public facilities for whites and non-whites, limited the activity of nonwhite labor unions and denied non-white participation in national government. Hendrik Verwoerd, who became prime minister in 1958, would refine apartheid policy further into a system he referred to as “separate development.” The Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959 created 10 Bantu homelands known as Bantustans. Separating Black South Africans from each other enabled the government to claim there was no Black majority and reduced the possibility that Blacks would unify into one nationalist organization.

Every Black South African was designated as a citizen as one of the Bantustans, a system that supposedly gave them full political rights, but effectively removed them from the nation’s political body. In one of the most devastating aspects of apartheid, the government forcibly removed Black South Africans from rural areas designated as “white” to the homelands and sold their land at low prices to white farmers. From 1961 to 1994, more than 3.5 million people were forcibly removed from their homes and deposited in the Bantustans, where they were plunged into poverty and hopelessness. Resistance to apartheid within South Africa took many forms over the years, from non-violent demonstrations, protests and strikes to political action and eventually to armed resistance.

Together with the South Indian National Congress, the ANC organized a mass meeting in 1952, during which attendees burned their pass books. A group calling itself the Congress of the People adopted a Freedom Charter in 1955 asserting that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, Black or white.” The government broke up the meeting and arrested 150 people, charging them with high treason. In 1960, at the Black township of Sharpeville, the police opened fire on a group of unarmed Black people associated with the Pan-African Congress (PAC), an offshoot of the ANC. The group had arrived at the police station without passes, inviting arrest as an act of resistance. At least 67 people were killed and more than 180 wounded.

The Sharpeville massacre convinced many anti-apartheid leaders that they could not achieve their objectives by peaceful means, and both the PAC and ANC established military wings, neither of which ever posed a serious military threat to the state. By 1961, most resistance leaders had been captured and sentenced to long prison terms or executed. Nelson Mandela, a founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), the military wing of the ANC, was incarcerated from 1963 to 1990; his imprisonment would draw international attention and help garner support for the anti-apartheid cause.

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blackkudos · 7 years ago

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Assata Shakur

Assata Olugbala Shakur (born JoAnne Deborah Byron; July 16, 1947), whose married name was Chesimard, is an activist, member of the left-wing Black Liberation Army (BLA), who was convicted of murder in 1977. She escaped from prison in 1979 and fled to Cuba in 1984, gaining political asylum.

Between 1971 and 1973, Shakur was charged with several crimes and was the subject of a multi-state manhunt. In May 1973, Shakur was involved in a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike, in which New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster was killed and Trooper James Harper was grievously assaulted; she was charged in these attacks. BLA member Zayd Malik Shakur was also killed in the incident, and Shakur was wounded. Between 1973 and 1977, Shakur was indicted in relation to six other incidents—charged with murder, attempted murder, armed robbery, bank robbery, and kidnapping. She was acquitted on three of the charges and three were dismissed. In 1977, she was convicted of the first-degree murder of Foerster and of seven other felonies related to the shootout.

Shakur was incarcerated in several prisons in the 1970s. She escaped from prison in 1979 and, after living as a fugitive for several years, fled to Cuba in 1984, where she received political asylum. She has been living in Cuba ever since. Since May 2, 2005, the FBI has classified her as a domestic terrorist and offered a $1 million reward for assistance in her capture. On May 2, 2013, the FBI added her to the Most Wanted Terrorist List; the first woman to be listed. On the same day, the New Jersey Attorney General offered to match the FBI reward, increasing the total reward for her capture to $2 million. In June 2017, President Donald Trump gave a speech cancelling the Obama administration's Cuba policy. A condition of making a new deal between the United States and Cuba is the release of political prisoners and the return of fugitives from justice. Trump specifically called for the return of "the cop–killer Joanne Chesimard."

Early life and education

Assata Shakur was born Joanne Deborah Byron, in Flushing, Queens, New York City, on July 16, 1947. She lived for three years with her mother, a school teacher, her Aunt Evelyn, a civil rights worker, and retired grandparents, Lula and Frank Hill. In 1950, Shakur's parents divorced and her grandparents moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, where she then spent most of her childhood with younger siblings, Mutulu and Beverly. Shakur moved back to Queens with her mother and stepfather after elementary school, attending Parsons Junior High School. However she still frequently visited her grandparents in the south. Their family struggled financially, and argued frequently, so Shakur was rarely ever home, exploring the street life. She often ran away, staying with strangers and working for short periods of time, until she was taken in by her aunt Evelyn to Manhattan. Here, Shakur underwent personal change. She has said that her Aunt Evelyn (Williams), her mother's sister, was the heroine of her childhood, as she was constantly introducing her to new things. She said that her aunt was "very sophisticated and knew all kinds of things. She was right up my alley because I was forever asking all kinds of questions. I wanted to know everything." Much of her time with Evelyn was spent in museums, theaters, and art galleries, and the conflicts that did rise between the two were typically due to Shakur's habit of lying.

Shakur dropped out of Cathedral high school to get a job and live on her own but later earned a General Educational Development (GED) with her aunt's help. Before dropping out of high school, she attended a segregated school in New York, which she discusses in her autobiography. As the only black student or one of a few in her classes, Shakur said that the integrated school system was poorly set up, and that teachers seemed surprised when she answered a question in class, as if not expecting black people to be intelligent and engaged. What she learned of history was sugar coated, because students were taught a version that ignored the oppression suffered by people of color, especially in the United States. As a child she performed in a play about George Washington's birthday, and said that she was to repeatedly sing “George Washington never told a lie.” In her autobiography she later wrote: “I didn’t know what a fool they had made out of me until i grew up and started to read real history” (Pg 33).

Shakur attended Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC), when she was introduced to the Golden Drums and then the City College of New York (CCNY) in the mid-1960s, where she was involved in many political activities, protests, and sit-ins. Shakur spent most of her time reading and learning from other activists. She was arrested for the first time in 1967 with 100 other BMCC students, on charges of trespassing. The students had chained and locked the entrance to a college building to protest a curriculum deficient in black studies and a lack of black faculty. In April 1967 she married Louis Chesimard, a fellow student-activist at CCNY. Their relationship was damaged by Louis’s marriage ideals, including a wife to properly cook and clean. Shakur would not conform, so a year into the relationship they decided to just be friends. They divorced in December 1970. Shakur devotes one paragraph of her autobiography to her marriage, and attributes its termination to disagreements related to gender roles.

Political activism and Black Panther Party

After graduation from CCNY at 23, Shakur became involved in the Black Panther Party (BPP), which had been founded in Oakland, California and had a branch in New York. She eventually became a leading member of the Harlem branch. Before joining the BPP, Shakur had met several of its members on a 1970 trip to Oakland. She had coordinated a school breakfast program to support students in need. She soon left the party, disliking the macho behavior of the men. She did not claim, as did other female Panthers such as Regina Jennings, that she had suffered sexual harassment.

Shakur believed that the BPP lacked knowledge and understanding of United States black history:

"The basic problem stemmed from the fact that the BPP had no systematic approach to political education. They were reading the Red Book but didn't know who Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey, and Nat Turner were. They talked about intercommunalism but still really believed that the Civil War was fought to free the slaves. A whole lot of them barely understood any kind of history, Black, African or otherwise. [...] That was the main reason many party members, in my opinion, underestimated the need to unite with other Black organizations and to struggle around various community issues."

That same year Chesimard changed her name to Assata Olugbala Shakur; In Arabic (related to the Muslim tradition in West Africa), Assata means "she who struggles", Olugbala means “love for the people”, and Shakur means "thankful one." (In addition, 'Abd Allah II ibn 'Ali 'Abd ash-Shakur was the last Emir of Harar in Ethiopia.) Her motivation behind this transition was because her life was now a part of African culture, all but her name. Joanne no longer represented her, as she wrote in her biography, “It sounded so strange when people called me Joanne. It really had nothing to do with me. I didn’t feel like no Joanne, or no negro, or no amerikan. I felt like an African woman”. As for the last name Chesimard, it was most likely a slave given name. Shakur joined the Black Liberation Army (BLA), described by The Guardian in 2013 as “a radical and violent organization of black activists.” Joy James said its "primary objective (was) to fight for the independence and self-determination of Afrikan people in the United States."

In 1971, Shakur joined the Republic of New Afrika. This black nationalist organization was formed to create an independent black-majority nation composed of the present-day states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, which had many black-majority areas and a history of slave societies and strong African-American culture.

Allegations and manhunt

On April 6, 1971, Shakur was shot in the stomach during a struggle with a guest at the Statler Hilton Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. According to police, Shakur knocked on the door of a room occupied by an out-of-town guest and asked "Is there a party going on here?" to which the occupant responded in the negative. Shakur allegedly displayed a revolver and demanded money, and a struggle ensued, during which she was shot by the revolver she had shown.

She was booked on charges of attempted robbery, felonious assault, reckless endangerment, and possession of a deadly weapon, then released on bail. Shakur is alleged to have said that she was glad that she had been shot since, afterward, she was no longer afraid to be shot again.

Following an August 23, 1971 bank robbery in Queens, Shakur was sought for questioning. A photograph of a woman (who was later alleged to be Shakur) wearing thick-rimmed black glasses, with a high hairdo pulled tightly over her head, and pointing a gun, was widely displayed in banks. The New York Clearing House Association paid for full-page ads displaying material about Shakur.

On December 21, 1971, Shakur was named as one of four suspects by New York City police in a hand grenade attack that destroyed a police car and slightly injured two patrolmen in Maspeth, Queens; a 13-state alarm was issued three days after the attack when a witness identified Shakur and Andrew Jackson from FBI photographs. Atlanta law enforcement officials said that Shakur and Jackson had lived together for several months in Atlanta, Georgia, in the summer of 1971.

Shakur was one of those wanted for questioning for wounding a police officer attempting to serve a traffic summons in Brooklyn on January 26, 1972. After a March 1, 1972 $89,000 Brooklyn bank robbery, a Daily News headline asked: "Was that JoAnne?"; Shakur was also wanted for questioning after a September 1, 1972 Bronx bank robbery. Based on FBI photographs, Msgr. John Powis alleged that Shakur was involved in an armed robbery at his Our Lady of the Presentation church in Brownsville, Brooklyn, on September 14, 1972.

In 1972, Shakur was the subject of a nationwide manhunt after the FBI alleged that she was the "revolutionary mother hen" of a Black Liberation Army cell that had conducted a "series of cold-blooded murders of New York City police officers." The FBI said these included the "execution style murders" of New York Police Officers Joseph Piagentini and Waverly Jones on May 21, 1971, and NYPD officers Gregory Foster and Rocco Laurie on January 28, 1972. Shakur was alleged to have been directly involved with the Foster and Laurie murders, and involved tangentially with the Piagentini and Jones murders.

Some sources identify Shakur as the de facto leader and the "soul of the Black Liberation Army" after the arrest of co-founder Dhoruba Moore. Robert Daley, Deputy Commissioner of the New York City Police, for example, described Shakur as "the final wanted fugitive, the soul of the gang, the mother hen who kept them together, kept them moving, kept them shooting."

As of February 17, 1972, when Shakur was identified as one of four BLA members on a short trip to Chattanooga, Tennessee, she was wanted for questioning (along with Robert Vickers, Twyman Meyers, Samuel Cooper, and Paul Stewart) in relation to police killings, a Queens bank robbery, and the grenade attack. Shakur was announced as one of six suspects in the ambushing of four policemen—two in Jamaica, Queens, and two in Brooklyn—on January 28, 1973, despite the fact that the assailants were identified as male.

By June 1973, an apparatus that would become the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) was issuing nearly daily briefings on Shakur's status and the allegations against her.

According to Cleaver and Katsiaficas, the FBI and local police "initiated a national search-and-destroy mission for suspected BLA members, collaborating in stakeouts that were the products of intensive political repression and counterintelligence campaigns like NEWKILL." They "attempted to tie Assata to every suspected action of the BLA involving a woman." The JTTF would later serve as the "coordinating body in the search for Assata and the renewed campaign to smash the BLA," after her escape from prison. After her capture, however, Shakur was not charged with any of the crimes for which she was the subject of the manhunt.

Shakur and others claim that she was targeted by the FBI's COINTELPRO as a result of her involvement with the black liberation organizations. Specifically, documentary evidence suggests that Shakur was targeted by an investigation named CHESROB, which "attempted to hook former New York Panther Joanne Chesimard (Assata Shakur) to virtually every bank robbery or violent crime involving a black woman on the East Coast." Although named after Shakur, CHESROB (like its predecessor, NEWKILL) was not limited to Shakur.

New Jersey Turnpike shootout

On May 2, 1973, at about 12:45 a.m., Assata Shakur, along with Zayd Malik Shakur (born James F. Costan) and Sundiata Acoli (born Clark Squire), were stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike in East Brunswick by State Trooper James Harper, backed up by Trooper Werner Foerster in a second patrol vehicle (Car 820), for driving with a broken tail light. According to Col. David B. Kelly, the vehicle was also "slightly" exceeding the speed limit. Recordings of Trooper Harper calling the dispatcher were played at the trials of both Acoli and Assata Shakur. After reporting his plans to stop the vehicle he had been following, Harper can later be heard to say: "Hold on—two black males, one female." The stop occurred 200 yards (183 m) south of what was then the Turnpike Authority administration building at exit 9, the headquarters of Troop D. Zayd Shakur was driving the two-door vehicle, Assata Shakur was seated in the right front seat, and Acoli was in the right rear seat. Trooper Harper asked the driver for identification, noticed a discrepancy, asked him to get out of the car, and questioned him at the rear of the vehicle.

It is at this point, with the questioning of Zayd Shakur, that the accounts of the confrontation begin to differ (see the witnesses section below). However, in the ensuing shootout, Trooper Foerster was shot twice in the head with his own gun and killed, Zayd Shakur was killed, and Assata Shakur and Trooper Harper were wounded.

According to initial police statements, at this point one or more of the suspects began firing with semiautomatic handguns and Trooper Foerster fired four times before falling mortally wounded. At Acoli's trial, Harper testified that the gunfight started "seconds" after Foerster arrived at the scene. At this trial, Harper said that Foerster reached into the vehicle, pulled out and held up a semiautomatic pistol and ammunition magazine, and said "Jim, look what I found," while facing Harper at the rear of the vehicle. At this point, Assata Shakur and Acoli were ordered to put their hands on their laps and not to move; Harper said that Assata Shakur then reached down to the right of her right leg, pulled out a pistol, and shot him in the shoulder, after which he retreated to behind his vehicle. Questioned by prosecutor C. Judson Hamlin, Harper said he saw Foerster shot just as Assata Shakur was felled by bullets from Harper's gun. Harper testified that Acoli shot Foerster with a .38 caliber semiautomatic pistol and then used Foerster's own gun to "execute him." According to the testimony of State Police investigators, two jammed semiautomatic pistols were discovered near Foerster's body.

Acoli then drove the car (a white Pontiac LeMans with Vermont license plates)—which contained Assata Shakur, who was wounded, and Zayd Shakur, who was dead or dying—5 miles (8 km) down the road at milepost 78 across from Service Area 8-N (the Joyce Kilmer Service Area), where Assata Shakur was apprehended. The vehicle was chased by three patrol cars and the booths down the turnpike were alerted. Acoli then exited the car and—after being ordered to halt by Trooper Robert Palentchar (Car 817), the first on the scene—fled into the woods as Palentchar emptied his gun. According to Palentchar, Assata Shakur then walked towards him from 50 feet (15 m) away with her bloody arms raised in surrender. Acoli was captured after a 36-hour manhunt—involving 400 people, state police helicopters, and bloodhounds from the Ocean County Sheriff's Department—the following day. Zayd Shakur's body was found in a nearby gully along the road.

At the time of the shootout, Assata Shakur was a member of the Black Liberation Army (BLA) and no longer a member of the Black Panther Party. According to a New Jersey Police spokesperson, Assata Shakur was on her way to a "new hideout in Philadelphia" and "heading ultimately for Washington" and a book in the vehicle contained a list of potential BLA targets. Assata Shakur testified that she was on her way to Baltimore for a job as a bar waitress.

Assata Shakur, with gunshot wounds in both arms and a shoulder was moved to Middlesex General Hospital, under "heavy guard," and was reported to be in "serious condition"; Trooper Harper was wounded in the left shoulder, in "good" condition, and given a protective guard at the hospital. Assata Shakur was interrogated and arraigned from her hospital bed, and her medical care during this period is often alleged to have been "substandard." She was transferred from Middlesex General Hospital in New Brunswick to Roosevelt Hospital in Edison after her lawyers obtained a court order from Judge John Bachman, and then transferred to Middlesex County Workhouse a few weeks later.

The Pontiac LeMans and Trooper Harper's patrol car were taken to a state police garage in East Brunswick. Following the incident, on May 11, the State Police instituted two-man night patrols on the turnpike and Garden State Parkway, although the change was not made public until June.

Criminal charges and dispositions

Between 1973 and 1977, in New York and New Jersey, Shakur was indicted ten times, resulting in seven different criminal trials. Shakur was charged with two bank robberies, the kidnapping of a Brooklyn heroin dealer, attempted murder of two Queens police officers stemming from a January 23, 1973 failed ambush, and eight other felonies related to the Turnpike shootout. Of these trials, three resulted in acquittals, one in a hung jury, one in a change of venue, one in a mistrial due to pregnancy, and one in a conviction; three indictments were dismissed without trial.

Turnpike shootout change of venue

On the charges related to the New Jersey Turnpike shootout, New Jersey Superior Court Judge Leon Gerofsky ordered a change of venue in 1973 from Middlesex to Morris County, New Jersey, saying "it was almost impossible to obtain a jury here comprising people willing to accept the responsibility of impartiality so that defendants will be protected from transitory passion and prejudice." Polls of residents in Middlesex County, where Acoli had been convicted less than three years earlier, showed that 83% knew her identity and 70% said she was guilty.

Bronx bank robbery mistrial

In December 1973, Shakur was tried for a September 29, 1972, $3,700 robbery of the Manufacturer's Hanover Trust Company in the Bronx, along with co-defendant Kamau Sadiki (born Fred Hilton). In light of the pending murder prosecution against Shakur in New Jersey state court, her lawyers requested that the trial be postponed for six months to permit further preparation. Judge Lee P. Gagliardi denied a postponement, and the Second Circuit denied Shakur's petition for mandamus. In protest, the lawyers stayed mute, and Shakur and Sadiki conducted their own defense. Seven other BLA members were indicted by District Attorney Eugene Gold in connection with the series of holdups and shootings on the same day, who—according to Gold—represented the "top echelon" of the BLA as determined by a year-long investigation.

The prosecution's case rested largely on the testimony of two men who had pleaded guilty to participating in the holdup. The prosecution called four witnesses: Avon White and John Rivers (both of whom had already been convicted of the robbery) and the manager and teller of the bank. White and Rivers, although convicted, had not yet been sentenced for the robbery and were promised that the charges would be dropped in exchange for their testimony. White and Rivers testified that Shakur had guarded one of the doors with a .357 magnum pistol and that Sadiki had served as a lookout and drove the getaway truck during the robbery; neither White nor Rivers was cross-examined due to the defense attorney's refusal to participate in the trial. Shakur's aunt and lawyer, Evelyn Williams, was also cited for contempt after walking out of the courtroom after many of her attempted motions were denied. The trial was delayed for a few days after Shakur was diagnosed with pleurisy.

During the trial, the defendants were escorted to a "holding pen" outside the courtroom several times after shouting complaints and epithets at Judge Gagliardi. While in the holding pen, they listened to the proceedings over loudspeakers. Both defendants were repeatedly cited for contempt of court and eventually barred from the courtroom, where the trial continued in their absence. A contemporary New York Times editorial criticized Williams for failing to maintain courtroom "decorum," comparing her actions to William Kunstler's recent contempt conviction for his actions during the "Chicago Seven" trial.

Sadiki's lawyer, Robert Bloom, attempted to have the trial dismissed and then postponed due to new "revelations" regarding the credibility of White, a former co-defendant working for the prosecution. Bloom had been assigned to defend Hilton over the summer, but White was not disclosed as a government witness until right before the trial. Judge Gagliardi instructed both the prosecution and the defense not to bring up Shakur or Sadiki's connections to the BLA, saying they were "not relevant." Gagliardi denied requests by the jurors to pose questions to the witnesses—either directly or through him—and declined to provide the jury with information they requested about how long the defense had been given to prepare, saying it was "none of their concern." This trial resulted in a hung jury and then a mistrial when the jury reported to Gagliardi that they were hopelessly deadlocked for the fourth time.

Bronx bank robbery retrial

The retrial was delayed for one day to give the defendants more time to prepare. The new jury selection was marked by attempts by Williams to be relieved of her duties due to disagreements with Shakur as well as Hilton's attorney. Judge Arnold Bauman denied the application, but directed another lawyer, Howard Jacobs, to defend Shakur while Williams remained the attorney of record. Shakur was ejected following an argument with Williams, and Hilton left with her as jury selection continued. After the selection of twelve jurors (60 were excused), Williams was allowed to retire from the case, with Shakur officially representing herself, assisted by lawyer Florynce Kennedy. In the retrial, White testified that the six alleged robbers had saved their hair clippings to create disguises, and identified a partially obscured head and shoulder in a photo taken from a surveillance camera as Shakur's. Kennedy objected to this identification on the grounds that the prosecutor, assistant United States attorney Peter Truebner, had offered to stipulate that Shakur was not depicted in any of the photographs. Although both White and Rivers testified that Shakur was wearing overalls during the robbery, the person identified as Shakur in the photograph was wearing a jacket. The defense attempted to discredit White on the grounds that he had spent eight months in Matteawan Hospital for the Criminally Insane in 1968, and White countered that he had faked insanity (by claiming to be Allah in front of three psychiatrists) to get transferred out of prison.

Shakur personally cross-examined the witnesses, getting White to admit that he had once been in love with her; the same day, one juror (who had been frequently napping during the trial) was replaced with an alternate. Like the first trial, the retrial was marked by the defendants leaving and/or being thrown out of the court room for periods of varying lengths. Both defendants were acquitted in the retrial; six jurors interviewed after the trial stated that they did not believe the two key prosecution witnesses. Shakur was immediately returned to Morristown, New Jersey, under a heavy guard following the trial. Louis Chesimard (Shakur's ex-husband) and Paul Stewart, the other two alleged robbers, had been acquitted in June.

Turnpike shootout mistrial

The Turnpike shootout proceedings continued with Judge John E. Bachman in Middlesex County. The jury was chosen from Morris County, which had a far smaller black population than Middlesex County. On this basis, Shakur unsuccessfully attempted to remove the trial to federal court.

Shakur was originally slated to be tried with Acoli, but the trials were separated (before jury selection was complete) due to Shakur's pregnancy, and hers resulted in a mistrial in 1974 because of the possibility of miscarriage; Shakur was then hospitalized on February 1.

Attempted murder dismissal

Shakur and four others (including Fred Hilton, Avon White, and Andrew Jackson) were indicted in the State Supreme Court in Bronx on December 31, 1973 on charges of attempting to shoot and kill two policemen—Michael O'Reilly and Roy Polliana, who were wounded but had since returned to duty—in a January 28, 1973, ambush in St. Albans, Queens. On March 5, 1974, two new defendants (Jeannette Jefferson and Robert Hayes) were named in an indictment involving the same charges. On April 26, while Shakur was pregnant, New Jersey Governor Brendan Byrne signed an extradition order to move Shakur to New York to face two counts of attempted murder, attempted assault, and possession of dangerous weapons related to the alleged ambush; however, Shakur declined to waive her right to an extradition hearing, and asked for a full hearing before Middlesex County Court Judge John E. Bachman.

Shakur was extradited to New York City on May 6, arraigned on May 11 (pleading innocent), and remanded to jail by Justice Albert S. McGrover of the State Supreme Court, pending a pretrial hearing on July 2. In November 1974, New York State Supreme Court Justice Peter Farrell dismissed the attempted murder indictment because of insufficient evidence, declaring "The court can only note with disapproval that virtually a year has passed before counsel made an application for the most basic relief permitted by law, namely an attack on the sufficiency of the evidence submitted by the grand jury."

Kidnapping trial

Shakur was indicted on May 30, 1974, on the charge of having robbed a Brooklyn bar and kidnapping bartender James E. Freeman for ransom. Shakur and co-defendant Ronald Myers were accused of entering the bar with pistols and shotguns, taking $50 from the register, kidnapping the bartender, leaving a note demanding a $20,000 ransom from the bar owner, and fleeing in a rented truck. Freeman was said to have later escaped unhurt. The text of Shakur's opening statement in the trial is reproduced in her autobiography. Shakur and co-defendant Ronald Myers were acquitted on December 19, 1975 after seven hours of jury deliberation, ending a three-month trial in front of Judge William Thompson.

Queens bank robbery trial

In July 1973, after being indicted by a grand jury, Shakur pleaded not guilty in Federal Court in Brooklyn to an indictment related to an August 31, 1971 $7,700 robbery of the Bankers Trust Company bank in Queens. Judge Jacob Mishlerset set a tentative trial date of November 5 that year. The trial was delayed until 1976, when Shakur was represented by Stanley Cohen and Evelyn Williams. In this trial, Shakur acted as her own co-counsel and told the jury in her opening testimony:

"I have decided to act as co-counsel, and to make this opening statement, not because I have any illusions about my legal abilities, but, rather, because there are things that I must say to you. I have spent many days and nights behind bars thinking about this trial, this outrage. And in my own mind, only someone who has been so intimately a victim of this madness as I have can do justice to what I have to say."

One bank employee testified that Shakur was one of the bank robbers, but three other bank employees (including two tellers) testified that they were uncertain. The prosecution showed surveillance photos of four of the six alleged robbers, contending that one of them was Shakur wearing a wig. Shakur was forcibly subdued and photographed by the FBI on the judge's order, after having refused to cooperate, believing that the FBI would use photo manipulation; a subsequent judge determined that the manners in which the photos were obtained violated Shakur's rights and ruled the new photos inadmissible. In her autobiography, Shakur recounts being beaten, choked, and kicked on the courtroom floor by five marshals, as Williams narrated the events to ensure they would appear on the court record. Shortly after deliberation began, the jury asked to see all the photographic exhibits taken from the surveillance footage. The jury determined that a widely circulated FBI photo allegedly showing Shakur participating in the robbery was not her.

Shakur was acquitted after seven hours of jury deliberation on January 16, 1976, and was immediately remanded back to New Jersey for the Turnpike trial. The actual transfer took place on January 29. She was the only one of the six suspects in the robbery to be brought to trial. Andrew Jackson and two others indicted for the same robbery pleaded guilty; Jackson was sentenced to five years in prison and five years' probation; another was shot and killed in a gun fight in Florida on December 31, 1971, and the last remained at large at the time of Shakur's acquittal.

Turnpike shootout retrial

By the time Shakur was retried in 1977, Acoli had already been convicted of the murder of Foerster (on the theory that he fired the bullets), and a total of 289 articles had been published in the local press relating to the various crimes with which Shakur had been accused. Shakur's trial, along with Acoli's, would end up costing Middlesex County an estimated $1 million.

Shakur again attempted to remove the trial to federal court. The United States District Court for the District of New Jersey denied the petition and also denied Shakur an injunction against the holding of trial proceedings on Fridays (the Muslim Sabbath). An en banc panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit affirmed.

The nine-week trial was widely publicized, and was even reported on by the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS). On March 25, 1977, back in Middlesex County, Shakur was convicted as an accomplice in the murders of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster and Zayd Shakur and possession of weapons, as well as of assault and attempted murder of Harper. During the trial, hundreds of civil rights campaigners demonstrated outside of the Middlesex County courthouse each day.

Following the 13-minute opening statement by Edward J. Barone, the first assistant Middlesex County prosecutor (directing the case for the state), William Kunstler (the chief of Shakur's defense staff) moved immediately for a mistrial, calling the eight-count grand jury indictment "adversary proceeding solely and exclusively under the control of the prosecutor," whom Kunstler accused of "improper prejudicial remarks"; Judge Theodore Appleby, noting the frequent defense interruptions that had characterized the previous days' jury selection, denied the motion. The prosecution contended that Shakur shot and killed her companion, Zayd Shakur, and "executed" Trooper Foerster with his own weapon.

The next day, the jury listened to State Police radio tapes while being provided with a printed transcript, an arrangement that resulted from "hours of haggling" between the defense and prosecution. The "climax" of the tape came when Trooper Ronald Foster, the State Police radio operator, shouted into his microphone "They just shot Harper! Be on the lookout for this car!" and "It is a Pontiac. It's got one tail light" after the wounded Harper entered into the administration building near the site of the shootout. As the tapes were played, Shakur was seated "calmly and without apparent concern" wearing a yellow turban and brightly colored floor-length dress over a white turtleneck sweater.

On February 23, Shakur's attorneys filed papers asking Judge Appleby to subpoena FBI Director Clarence Kelley, Senator Frank Church and other federal and New York law enforcement officials to testify about the Counter Intelligence Program, which they alleged was designed to harass and disrupt black activist organizations. Kunstler had previously been successful in subpoenaing Kelley and Church for the trials of American Indian Movement (AIM) members charged with murdering FBI agents. The motion (argued March 2)—which also asked the court to require the production of memos, tapes, documents, and photographs of alleged COINTELPRO involvement from 1970 to 1973—was denied.

Shakur herself was called as a witness on March 15, the first witness called by the defense; she denied shooting either Harper or Foerster, and also denied handling a weapon during the incident. She was questioned by her own attorney, Stuart Ball, for under 40 minutes, and then cross-examined by Barone for less than two hours (see the Witnesses section below). Ball's questioning ended with the following exchange:

"On that night of May 2[n]d, did you shoot, kill, execute or have anything to do with the death of Trooper Werner Foerster?""No.""Did you shoot or assault Trooper James Harper?""No."

Under cross-examination, Shakur was unable to explain how three magazines of ammunition and 16 live shells had gotten into her shoulder bag; she also admitted to knowing that Zayd Shakur carried a gun at times, and specifically to seeing a gun sticking out of Acoli's pocket while stopping for supper at a Howard Johnson's restaurant shortly before the shooting. Shakur admitted to carrying an identification card with the name "Justine Henderson" in her billfold the night of the shootout, but denied using any of the aliases on the long list that Barone proceeded to read.

Defense attorneys

Shakur's defense attorneys were William Kunstler (the chief of Shakur's defense staff), Stuart Ball, Robert Bloom, Raymond A. Brown, Stanley Cohen (who died of unknown causes early on in the Turnpike trial), Lennox Hinds, Florynce Kennedy, Louis Myers, Laurence Stern, and Evelyn Williams, Shakur's aunt. Of these attorneys, Kunstler, Ball, Cohen, Myers, Stern and Williams appeared in court for the turnpike trial. Kunstler became involved in Shakur's trials in 1975, when contacted by Williams, and commuted from New York City to New Brunswick every day with Stern.

Her attorneys, in particular Lennox Hinds, were often held in contempt of court, which the National Conference of Black Lawyers cited as an example of systemic bias in the judicial system. The New Jersey Legal Ethics Committee also investigated complaints against Hinds for comparing Shakur's murder trial to "legalized lynching" undertaken by a "kangaroo court." Hinds' disciplinary proceeding reached the U.S. Supreme Court in Middlesex County Ethics Committee v. Garden State Bar Ass'n (1982). According to Kunstler's autobiography, the sizable contingent of New Jersey State Troopers guarding the courthouse were under strict orders from their commander, Col. Clinton Pagano, to completely shun Shakur's defense attorneys.

Judge Appleby also threatened Kunstler with dismissal and contempt of court after he delivered an October 21, 1976 speech at nearby Rutgers University that in part discussed the upcoming trial, but later ruled that Kunstler could represent Shakur. Until obtaining a court order, Williams was forced to strip naked and undergo a body search before each of her visits with Shakur—during which Shakur was shackled to a bed by both ankles. Judge Appleby also refused to investigate a burglary of her defense counsel's office that resulted in the disappearance of trial documents, amounting to half of the legal papers related to her case. Her lawyers also claimed that their offices were bugged.

Tensions and dissension existed among the members of the defense team. Evelyn Williams felt that she was a victim of male prejudice stating that "for the second time in (her) legal career (she) became aware of the disdain with which men perceive women." She expressed "amazement and contempt" for the actions of her fellow lawyers as she watched their "infighting for center stage" during the trial. Other members of the team were concerned that Williams was overly aggressive during her sole cross-examination to the point of passing her notes that read, in part, "You're antagonizing the jury" and "Shut up and sit down."

Witnesses

Sundiata Acoli, Assata Shakur, Trooper Harper, and a New Jersey Turnpike driver who saw part of the incident were the only surviving witnesses. Acoli did not testify or make any pre-trial statements, nor did he testify in his own trial or give a statement to the police. The driver traveling north on the turnpike testified that he had seen a State Trooper struggling with a Black man between a white vehicle and a State Trooper car, whose revolving lights illuminated the area.

Shakur testified that Trooper Harper shot her after she raised her arms to comply with his demand. She said that the second shot hit her in the back as she turned to avoid it, and that she fell onto the road for the duration of the gunfight before crawling back into the backseat of the Pontiac—which Acoli drove 5 miles (8 km) down the road and parked. She testified that she remained there until State Troopers dragged her onto the road.

Trooper Harper's official reports state that after he stopped the Pontiac, he ordered Acoli to the back of the vehicle for Trooper Foerster—who had arrived on the scene—to examine his driver's license. The reports then state that after Acoli complied, and as Harper was looking inside the vehicle to examine the registration, Trooper Foerster yelled and held up an ammunition magazine as Shakur simultaneously reached into her red pocketbook, pulled out a nine-millimeter weapon and fired at him. Trooper Harper's reports then state that he ran to the rear of his car and shot at Shakur who had exited the vehicle and was firing from a crouched position next to the vehicle.

Under cross-examination at both Acoli and Shakur's trials, Trooper Harper admitted to having lied in these reports and in his Grand Jury testimony about Trooper Foerster yelling and showing him an ammunition magazine, about seeing Shakur holding a pocketbook or a gun inside the vehicle, and about Shakur shooting at him from the car. Trooper Harper retracted his previous statements and said that he had never seen Shakur with a gun and that she did not shoot him.

Jury

A total of 408 potential jurors were questioned during the voir dire, which concluded on February 14. All of the 15 jurors—ten women and five men—were white, and most were under thirty years old. Five jurors had personal ties to State Troopers (one girlfriend, two nephews, and two friends). A sixteenth female juror was removed before the trial formally opened when it was determined that Sheriff Joseph DeMarino of Middlesex County, while a private detective several years earlier, had worked for a lawyer who represented the juror's husband. Judge Appleby repeatedly denied Kunstler's requests for DeMarino to be removed from his responsibilities for the duration of the trial "because he did not divulge his association with the juror."

One prospective juror was dismissed for reading Target Blue, a book by Robert Daley, a former New York City Deputy Police Commander, which dealt in part with Shakur and had been left in the jury assembly room. Before the jury entered the courtroom, Judge Appleby ordered Shakur's lawyers to remove a copy of Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley from a position on the defense counsel table easily visible to jurors. The Roots TV miniseries adapted from the book and shown shortly before the trial was believed to have evoked feelings of "guilt and sympathy" with many white viewers.

Shakur's attorneys sought a new trial on the grounds that one jury member, John McGovern, had violated the jury's sequestration order. Judge Appleby rejected Kunstler's claim that the juror had violated the order. McGovern later sued Kunstler for defamation; Kunstler eventually publicly apologized to McGovern and paid him a small settlement. Additionally, in his autobiography, Kunstler alleged that he later learned from a law enforcement agent that a New Jersey State Assembly member had addressed the jury at the hotel where they were sequestered, urging them to convict Shakur.

Due to the high security of the trial and the sequestration, Shakur's trial, along with Acoli's, cost Middlesex County an estimated $1 million combined. In September 1977, New Jersey Governor Brendan Byrne vetoed a bill to give the Morris County sheriff $7,491 for overtime expenses incurred in guarding Shakur's jury.

Medical evidence

A key element of Shakur's defense was medical testimony meant to demonstrate that she was shot with her hands up and that she would have been subsequently unable to fire a weapon. A neurologist testified that the median nerve in Shakur's right arm was severed by the second bullet, making her unable to pull a trigger. Neurosurgeon Dr. Arthur Turner Davidson, Associate Professor of Surgery at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, testified that the wounds in her upper arms, armpit and chest, and severed median nerve that instantly paralyzed her right arm, would only have been caused if both arms were raised, and that to sustain such injuries while crouching and firing a weapon (as described in Trooper Harper's testimony) "would be anatomically impossible."

Davidson based his testimony on an August 4, 1976 examination of Shakur and on X-rays taken immediately after the shootout at Middlesex General Hospital. Prosecutor Barone questioned whether Davidson was qualified to make such a judgment 39 months after the injury; Barone proceeded to suggest (while a female Sheriff's attendant acted out his suggestion) that Shakur was struck in the right arm and collar bone and "then spun around by the impact of the bullet so an immediate second shot entered the fleshy part of her upper left arm" to which Davidson replied "Impossible."

Dr. David Spain, a pathologist from Brookdale Community College, testified that her bullet scars as well as X-rays supported her claim that her arms were raised, and that there was "no conceivable way" the first bullet could have hit Shakur's clavicle if her arm was down.

Judge Appleby eventually cut off funds for any further expert defense testimony. Shakur, in her autobiography, and Williams, in Inadmissible Evidence, both claim that it was difficult to find expert witnesses for the trial. Not only because of the financial expense, but also because most forensic and ballistic specialists declined on the grounds of a conflict of interest when approached because they routinely performed such work for law enforcement officials.

Other evidence

Neutron activation analysis administered after the shootout showed no gunpowder residue on Shakur's fingers; her fingerprints were not found on any weapon at the scene, according to forensic analysis performed at the Trenton, New Jersey crime lab and the FBI crime labs in Washington, D.C. According to tape recordings and police reports made several hours after the shoot-out, when Harper returned on foot to the administration building 200 yards (183 m) away, he did not report Foerster's presence at the scene; no one at headquarters knew of Foerster's involvement in the shoot-out until his body was discovered beside his patrol car, more than an hour later.

Conviction and sentencing

On March 24, the jurors listened for 45 minutes to a rereading of testimony of the State Police chemist regarding the blood found at the scene, on the LeMans, and Shakur's clothing. That night, the second night of jury deliberation, the jury asked Judge Appleby to repeat his instructions regarding the four assault charges 30 minutes before retiring for the night, which led to speculation that the jury had decided in Shakur's favor on the remaining charges, especially the two counts of murder. Appleby reiterated that the jury must consider separately the four assault charges (atrocious assault and battery, assault on a police officer acting in the line of duty, assault with a deadly weapon, and assault with intent to kill), each of which carried a total maximum penalty of 33 years in prison. The other charges were: first-degree murder (of Foerster), second-degree murder (of Zayd Shakur), illegal possession of a weapon, and armed robbery (related to Foerster's service revolver). The jury also asked Appleby to repeat the definitions of "intent" and "reasonable doubt."

Shakur was convicted on all eight counts: two murder charges, and six assault charges. The prosecution did not need to prove that Shakur fired the shots that killed either Trooper Foerster or Zayd Shakur: being an accomplice to murder carries an equivalent life sentence under New Jersey law. Upon hearing the verdict, Shakur said—in a "barely audible voice"—that she was "ashamed that I have even taken part in this trial" and that the jury was "racist" and had "convicted a woman with her hands up." Judge Appleby told the court attendants to "remove the prisoner" and Shakur replied: "the prisoner will walk away on her own feet." After Joseph W. Lewis, the jury foreman, read the verdict, Kunstler asked that the jury be removed before alleging that one juror had violated the sequestration order (see above).

At the post trial press conference Kunstler blamed the verdict on racism stating that "the white element was there to destroy her." When asked by a reporter that if that were the case why did it take the jury 24 hours to reach a verdict Kunstler replied, "That was just a pretense." A few minutes later the prosecutor Barone disagreed with Kunstler's assessment saying the trial's outcome was decided "completely on the facts."

At Shakur's sentencing hearing on April 25, Appleby sentenced her to 26 to 33 years in state prison (10 to 12 for the four counts of assault, 12 to 15 for robbery, 2 to 3 for armed robbery, plus 2 to 3 for aiding and abetting the murder of Foerster), to be served consecutively with her mandatory life sentence. However, Appleby dismissed the second-degree murder of Zayd Shakur, as the New Jersey Supreme Court had recently narrowed the application of the law. Appleby finally sentenced Shakur to 30 days in the Middlesex County Workhouse for contempt of court, concurrent with the other sentences, for refusing to rise when he entered the courtroom. To become eligible for parole, Shakur would have had to serve a minimum of 25 years, which would have included her four years in custody during the trials.

Nelson murder dismissal

In October 1977, New York State Superior Court Justice John Starkey dismissed murder and robbery charges against Shakur related to the death of Richard Nelson during a December 28, 1972, hold-up of a Brooklyn social club, ruling that the state had delayed too long in bringing her to trial. Judge Starkey said, "People have constitutional rights, and you can't shuffle them around." The case was delayed in being brought to trial as a result of an agreement between the governors of New York and New Jersey as to the priority of the various charges against Shakur. Three other defendants were indicted in relation to the same holdup: Melvin Kearney, who died in 1976 from an eight-floor fall while trying to escape from the Brooklyn House of Detention, Twymon Myers, who was killed by police while a fugitive, and Andrew Jackson, the charges against whom were dismissed when two prosecution witnesses could not identify him in a lineup.

Attempted robbery dismissal

On November 22, 1977, Shakur pleaded not guilty to an attempted armed robbery indictment stemming from the 1971 incident at the Statler Hilton Hotel. Shakur was accused of attempting to rob a Michigan man staying at the hotel of $250 of cash and personal property. During the incident Shakur was shot in the stomach and subsequently arrested, booked, and released on bail. The prosecutor was C. Richard Gibbons. The charges were dismissed without trial.

Imprisonment

After the Turnpike shootings, Shakur was imprisoned in New Jersey State Reception and Correction center in Yardville, Burlington County, New Jersey and later moved to Rikers Island Correctional Institution for Women in New York City where she was kept in solitary confinement for 21 months. Shakur's only daughter, Kakuya Shakur, was conceived during her trial and born on September 11, 1974 in the "fortified psychiatric ward" at Elmhurst General Hospital in Queens, where Shakur stayed for a few days before being returned to Rikers Island. In her autobiography, Shakur claims that she was beaten and restrained by several large female officers after refusing a medical exam from a prison doctor shortly after giving birth. While imprisoned on Rikers Island, Shakur filed a § 1983 suit related to the conditions of her confinement; she was unsuccessful in persuading the federal courts to order that the legal aid paralegals assisting in her claim be granted attorney-like visitation rights.

After a bomb threat was made against Judge Appleby, Sheriff Joseph DeMarino lied to the press about the exact date of her transfer to Clinton Correctional Facility for Women for security reasons. She was also transferred from the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women to a special area staffed by women guards at the Yardville Youth Correction and Reception Center in New Jersey, where she was the only female inmate, for "security reasons." When Kunstler first took on Shakur's case (before meeting her), he described her basement cell as "adequate," which nearly resulted in his dismissal as her attorney. On May 6, 1977, Judge Clarkson Fisher, of the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey, denied Shakur's request for an injunction requiring her transfer from the all-male facility to Clinton Correctional Facility for Women; the Third Circuit affirmed.

On April 8, 1978, Shakur was transferred to Alderson Federal Prison Camp in Alderson, West Virginia where she met Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebrón and Mary Alice, a Catholic nun, who introduced Shakur to the concept of liberation theology. At Alderson, Shakur was housed in the Maximum Security Unit, which also contained several members of the Aryan Sisterhood as well as Sandra Good and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, followers of Charles Manson.

On March 31, 1978, after the Maximum Security Unit at Alderson was closed, Shakur was transferred to the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey. According to her attorney Lennox Hinds, Shakur "understates the awfulness of the condition in which she was incarcerated," which included vaginal and anal searches. Hinds argues that "in the history of New Jersey, no woman pretrial detainee or prisoner has ever been treated as she was, continuously confined in a men's prison, under twenty-four-hour surveillance of her most intimate functions, without intellectual sustenance, adequate medical attention, and exercise, and without the company of other women for all the years she was in custody."

Shakur was identified as a political prisoner as early as October 8, 1973 by Angela Davis, and in an April 3, 1977, New York Timesadvertisement purchased by the Easter Coalition for Human Rights. An international panel of seven jurists representing the United Nations Commission on Human Rights concluded in 1979 that her treatment was "totally unbefitting any prisoner." Their investigation, which focused on alleged human rights abuses of political prisoners, cited Shakur as "one of the worst cases" of such abuses and including her in "a class of victims of FBI misconduct through the COINTELPRO strategy and other forms of illegal government conduct who as political activists have been selectively targeted for provocation, false arrests, entrapment, fabrication of evidence, and spurious criminal prosecutions." Amnesty International, however, did not regard Shakur as a former political prisoner.

Escape

On November 2, 1979 she escaped the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey, when three members of the Black Liberation Army visiting her drew concealed .45-caliber pistols, seized two guards as hostages and commandeered a prison van. The van escaped through an unfenced section of the prison into the parking lot of a state school for the handicapped, 1.5 miles (2 km) away, where a blue-and-white Lincoln and a blue Mercury Comet were waiting. No one was injured during the prison break, including the guards held as hostages who were left in the parking lot. Her brother, Mutulu Shakur, Silvia Baraldini, former Panther Sekou Odinga, and Marilyn Buck were charged with assisting in her escape; Ronald Boyd Hill was also held on charges related to the escape. In part for his role in the event, Mutulu was named on July 23, 1982 as the 380th addition to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, where he remained for the next four years until his capture in 1986. State correction officials disclosed in November 1979 that they had not run identity checks on Shakur's visitors and that the three men and one woman who assisted in her escape had presented false identification to enter the prison's visitor room, before which they were not searched. Mutulu Shakur and Marilyn Buck were convicted in 1988 of several robberies as well as the prison escape.

At the time of the escape, Kunstler had just started to prepare her appeal. After her escape, Shakur lived as a fugitive for several years. The FBI circulated wanted posters throughout the New York – New Jersey area; her supporters hung "Assata Shakur is Welcome Here" posters in response. In New York, three days after her escape, more than 5,000 demonstrators organized by the National Black Human Rights Coalition carried signs with the same slogan. The image of Shakur on the wanted posters featured a wig and blurred black-and-white features (pictured right).

For years after Shakur's escape, the movements, activities, and phone calls of her friends and relatives—including her daughter walking to school in upper Manhattan—were monitored by investigators in an attempt to ascertain her whereabouts. In July 1980, FBI director William Webster said that the search for Shakur had been frustrated by residents' refusal to cooperate, and a New York Times editorial opined that the department's commitment to "enforce the law with vigor—but also with sensitivity for civil rights and civil liberties" had been "clouded" by an "apparently crude sweep" through a Harlem building in search of Shakur. In particular, one pre-dawn April 20, 1980 raid on 92 Morningside Avenue, during which FBI agents armed with shotguns and machine guns broke down doors, and searched through the building for several hours, while preventing residents from leaving, was seen by residents as having "racist overtones." In October 1980, New Jersey and New York City Police denied published reports that they had declined to raid a Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn building where Shakur was suspected to be hiding for fear of provoking a racial incident.

Political asylum in Cuba

Shakur fled to Cuba by 1984; in that year she was granted political asylum in that country. The Cuban government paid approximately $13 a day toward her living expenses. In 1985 she was reunited with her daughter, Kakuya, who had been raised by Shakur's mother in New York.

In an open letter, Shakur has called Cuba "One of the Largest, Most Resistant and Most Courageous Palenques (Maroon Camps) that has ever existed on the Face of this Planet." She also referred to herself as a "20th century escaped slave." Shakur is also known to have worked as an English-language editor for Radio Havana Cuba.

Books

In 1987, she published Assata: An Autobiography, which was written in Cuba. Her autobiography has been cited in relation to critical legal studies and critical race theory. The book does not give a detailed account of the events on the New Jersey Turnpike, except saying that the jury "Convicted a woman with her hands up!" It gives an account of her life beginning with her youth in the South and New York. Shakur challenges traditional styles of literary autobiography and offers the public a perspective on her life that is not easily accessible to the public. The book was published by Lawrence Hill & Company in the United States and Canada but the copyright is held by Zed Books Ltd. of London due to "Son of Sam" laws, which restrict who can receive profits from a book. In the six months preceding the publications of the book, Evelyn Williams, Shakur's aunt and attorney, made several trips to Cuba and served as a go-between with Hill.

In 1993, she published a second book, Still Black, Still Strong, with Dhoruba bin Wahad and Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Extradition attempts

In 1997, Carl Williams, the superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, wrote a letter to Pope John Paul II asking him to raise the issue of Shakur's extradition during his talks with President Fidel Castro. During the pope's visit to Cuba in 1998, Shakur agreed to an interview with NBC journalist Ralph Penza. Shakur later published an extensive criticism of the NBC segment, which inter-spliced footage of Trooper Foerster's grieving widow with an FBI photo connected to a bank robbery of which Shakur had been acquitted. On March 10, 1998 New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman asked Attorney General Janet Reno to do whatever it would take to return Shakur from Cuba. Later in 1998, U.S. media widely reported claims that the United States State Department had offered to lift the Cuban embargo in exchange for the return of 90 U.S. fugitives, including Shakur.

In September 1998, the United States Congress passed a non-binding resolution asking Cuba for the return of Shakur as well as 90 fugitives believed by Congress to be residing in Cuba; House Concurrent Resolution 254 passed 371–0 in the House and by unanimous consent in the Senate. The Resolution was due in no small part to the lobbying efforts of Governor Whitman and New Jersey Representative Bob Franks. Before the passage of the Resolution, Franks stated: "This escaped murderer now lives a comfortable life in Cuba and has launched a public relations campaign in which she attempts to portray herself as an innocent victim rather than a cold-blooded murderer."

In an open letter to Castro, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus Representative Maxine Waters of California later explained that many members of the Caucus (including herself) were against Shakur's extradition but had mistakenly voted for the bill, which was placed on the accelerated suspension calendar, generally reserved for non-controversial legislation. In the letter, Waters explained her opposition, calling COINTELPRO "illegal, clandestine political persecution."

On May 2, 2005, the 32nd anniversary of the Turnpike shootings, the FBI classified her as a domestic terrorist, increasing the reward for assistance in her capture to $1 million, the largest reward placed on an individual in the history of New Jersey. New Jersey State Police superintendent Rick Fuentes said "she is now 120 pounds of money." The bounty announcement reportedly caused Shakur to "drop out of sight" after having previously lived relatively openly (including having her home telephone number listed in her local telephone directory).

New York City Councilman Charles Barron, a former Black Panther, has called for the bounty to be rescinded. The New Jersey State Police and Federal Bureau of Investigation each still have an agent officially assigned to her case. Calls for Shakur's extradition increased following Fidel Castro's transfer of presidential duties; in a May 2005 television address, Castro had called Shakur a victim of racial persecution, saying "they wanted to portray her as a terrorist, something that was an injustice, a brutality, an infamous lie." In 2013 the FBI announced it had made Shakur the first woman on its list of most wanted terrorists. The reward for her capture and return was also doubled to $2 million that year.

Cultural influence

A documentary film about Shakur, Eyes of the Rainbow, written and directed by Cuban filmmaker Gloria Rolando, appeared in 1997. The official premiere of the film in Havana in 2004 was promoted by Casa de las Américas, the main cultural forum of the Cuban government. The National Conference of Black Lawyers and Mos Def are among the professional organizations and entertainers to support Assata Shakur; the "Hands Off Assata" campaign is organized by Dream Hampton.

Numerous musicians have composed and recorded songs about her or dedicated to her:

Common recorded "A Song for Assata" on his album Like Water for Chocolate (2000) after traveling to Havana to meet with Shakur personally.

Paris ("Assata's Song", in Sleeping with the Enemy (1992), Public Enemy ("Rebel Without A Pause" in It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back(1988), 2Pac ("Words of Wisdom" in 2Pacalypse Now (1991), Digital Underground ("Heartbeat Props" in Sons of the P, 1991), The Roots ("The Adventures in Wonderland" in Illadelph Halflife, 1996), Asian Dub Foundation ("Committed to Life" in Community Music, 2000), Saul Williams ("Black Stacey" in Saul Williams, 2004), Rebel Diaz ("Which Side Are You On?" in Otro Guerrillero Mixtape Vol. 2, 2008), Lowkey ("Something Wonderful" in Soundtrack to the Struggle, 2011), Murs ("Tale of Two Cities" in The Final Adventure, 2012), Jay Z ("Open Letter Part II" in 2013), Digable Planets, The Underachievers and X-Clan have also recorded songs about Shakur. Shakur has been described as a "rap music legend" and a "minor cause celebre."

On December 12, 2006, the Chancellor of the City University of New York, Matthew Goldstein, directed City College's president, Gregory H. Williams, to remove the "unauthorized and inappropriate" designation of the "Guillermo Morales/Assata Shakur Community and Student Center," which was named by students in 1989. A student group won the right to use the lounge after a campus shutdown over proposed tuition increases. CUNY was sued by student and alumni groups after removing the plaque. As of April 7, 2010, the presiding judge has ruled that the issues of students' free speech and administrators' immunity from suit "deserve a trial."

Following controversy, in 1995 Borough of Manhattan Community College renamed a scholarship that had previously been named for Shakur. In 2008, a Bucknell University professor included Shakur in a course on "African-American heroes"—along with figures such as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, John Henry, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis. Her autobiography is studied together with those of Angela Davis and Elaine Brown, the only women activists of the Black Power movement who have published book-length autobiographies. Rutgers University professor H. Bruce Franklin, who excerpts Shakur's book in a class on 'Crime and Punishment in American Literature,' describes her as a "revolutionary fighter against imperialism."

Black NJ State Trooper Anthony Reed (who has left the force) sued the police force because, among other things, persons had hanged posters of Shakur, altered to include Reed's badge number, in a Newark barracks. He felt it was intended to insult him, as she had killed an officer, and was "racist in nature." According to Dylan Rodriguez, to many "U.S. radicals and revolutionaries" Shakur represents a "venerated (if sometimes fetishized) signification of liberatory desire and possibility."

The largely Internet-based "Hands Off Assata!" campaign is coordinated by Chicago-area Black Radical Congress activists.

In 2015, New Jersey's Kean University dropped hip-hop artist Common as a commencement speaker because of police complaints. Members of the State Troopers Fraternal Association of New Jersey expressed their anger over Common's "A Song For Assata."

In 2015, Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza writes: “When I use Assata’s powerful demand in my organizing work, I always begin by sharing where it comes from, sharing about Assata’s significance to the Black Liberation Movement, what its political purpose and message is, and why it’s important in our context."

The Chicago Black activist group Assata's Daughters is named in her honor.

Terrorist list

Assata Shakur was moved to the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists List on May 2, 2013, the 40th anniversary of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster's murder.

Wikipedia

#Assata Shakur #07-16

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nataliesnews · 3 years ago

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A white South African on her experience during the apartheid regime 12.10.2010

'For us, Mandela was just another terrorist'

A white South African on her experience during the apartheid regime, and the moral failure of progressives to challenge the racist system

Yuli Novak | Oct. 12, 2021 | 1:56 AM | 1

On the southern edge of Africa, facing the ocean, with Table Mountain behind us, she tells me: “I only heard of Nelson Mandela years later. You probably wonder how it’s possible for an educated and socially involved South African woman to have never heard of one of the people who, at the time, in the mid-1980s, was one of the most famous people in the world. Well, the truth is that for us, the whites in apartheid South Africa, he was not much more than one of the many terrorists serving a prison sentence."

“You know, I often think about life experiences – mine, those of my community – under apartheid. Nobody focuses on us, the working and lower middle class liberal whites in apartheid South Africa, and rightly so. After all, we didn’t do anything special to oppose it or to end it. Back then we just tried to live our lives, and to be the best people we could be, at the same time. We always knew we were nothing like the racist Afrikaners who hated Black people. On the contrary: My parents, for example, both of them Holocaust survivors, always taught us to treat people everywhere with respect, regardless of their skin color."

“In hindsight, I think that being progressive in apartheid South Africa was mainly a matter of consciousness and less a practical thing. In our house we had a saying, which was said half in jest: We vote for the Liberal Party, but thank God the National Party is in power. They, the Afrikaners in the government, were ultra-nationalists and racists, but at least they had a clear program as to how to keep a minority of whites alive in a mainly Black continent."

“The Liberal or progressive Party, for which we voted in elections and which reflected our values, had no alternative political program that sounded realistic. The possibility of living together, in one country, in which everyone would be equal? Don’t make me laugh; that wasn’t an option that anyone took seriously."

“You have to understand, the story we were born into was that if the Black people took over it would be a disaster. In the ‘80s it even got worse: Those were terrible years in South Africa, with violence and hatred everywhere. Mainly, the areas in which the Black people lived, the townships, were on fire. So imagine this situation, for example: We’re sitting in the living room in the evening and listening to the news about the riots in the townships. And then someone from the family remarks: ‘Look how they’re killing one another and burning the schools we built for them.’"

“You understand, the whole story was that the violence of the Black people is always unfocused and irrational, and the conclusion was that that’s just how they are – violent. We didn’t think of it as racism; there simply was no other way for us to understand what was happening around us. We knew that if the Black people rose to power in South Africa they would probably throw us into the ocean. And the truth is that as a progressive – what you today in Israel would call a ‘leftist’ – I couldn’t blame them."

“I think that in terms of politics, my strongest experience of apartheid was of ‘knowing and not knowing.’ This was like living in a kind of gray area of consciousness: a situation in which knowing and not-knowing clashed, and you had to navigate between them, to push aside what was impossible to comprehend and to integrate the things you were capable of dealing with."

“So we, as liberals, were the opposition to the National Party. And yes, we definitely considered ourselves to be the good guys, the good side in the system. But we never thought about the possibility that the entire system was bad, and that the fact that we were part of it was what enabled it to exist. Those were overly radical thoughts, which were reserved only for those who came out against the regime, who were imprisoned."

“Ah, you actually asked about Mandela, didn’t you? So I think that even the political prisoners – whom we didn’t call by that name, and didn’t think of them as such – were in a sense part of that same knowing and not knowing. For us, the only way to think about all those who were imprisoned for decades was via the discourse of terror. That was also backed up by laws, because it was forbidden to express identification with the African National Congress, Mandela’s organization, which was considered a terrorist organization.

“So that’s how it happened that over 20 years after Mandela was imprisoned, and after he had already become a symbol of a freedom fighter – across the world – for us, he was just another terrorist, whose name didn’t even deserve to be remembered. I lived in a very liberal environment, and still, I didn’t know anyone who supported terrorism. We were good people, really. There are simply things that are outside the boundaries of our thinking. I believe that most of the people who live under regimes of that kind, the privileged ones, are good people."

“Sometimes I would like to reinvent my biography, to say that I was one of those few who realized already then that apartheid is evil, who joined the struggle, who were imprisoned, who went into exile. But thinking about it now, perhaps there is also importance to this unheroic experience, of ‘knowing and not knowing.’ Because it can teach us something profound about the way in which such regimes shape the daily perceptions of all the good people, so that they can continue to exist – without understanding that we are in effect those who enable evil to flourish.”

The writer is a political activist, the former executive director of Breaking the Silence. Her book, “Mi At Bikhlal” (“Who Do You Think You Are?”) is forthcoming.

#A white South African on her experience during the apartheid regime 12.10.2010

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diarrheaworldstarhiphop · 7 years ago

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So, big takeaway from your posts is that south Africa is going there way of Zimbabwe in all regards?

yeah

South Africa is a democracy with a recent legacy of black oppression where less than 10% of the population are white (a far cry from nearly a quarter of the population 100 years ago), which means mob rule that favours the majority.

and similar to how some western countries pander to the radical fringe of their country to retain power, the ANC has capitulated to the radical left and nationalist wings of the black population demanding dramatic economic upheavel off the backs of the white population. So we can expect a continued slide toward a situation very similar to what Zimbabwe condemned itself to, because white people are an ideal scapegoat for the ongoing malaise of the south african economy where the unemployment rate has soared to nearly 25% and the Rand’s value collapses against the US dollar. Additionally, white people with their land ownership and relative economic wealth is an ideal distraction away from the ruling ANC’s corruption and inability to help the population. The government is all too pleased to point to white afrikaners to distract from the failures of their own party and government which has held power over the country since Nelson Mandela lead the party at the end of apartheid in 1994.

We are past the point of no return now that the government is amending the constitution to mandate seizure from the white population. There are little in terms of restraint from the ANC and nothing but pressure from the radical parties biting at some of the ANC’s seats. The amendment motion was put forward by Julius Malema of the EFF, who recently was a leader in the ANC until ouster for his views…

He famously, over a year ago, said to raucous applause and laughter, that

“we are not calling for the slaughtering of white people, at least for now.”

youtube

Either White people gradually leave the country from government pressure or they are pushed into rebellion against the state. Rural white farmers, or boers, have already faced and fought gangs of black radicals intent on forcing them off their lands.

So ends yet another BRICS country

i guess it should just be IC today lmao

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blogbamnbyanymeansnecessary-blog · 7 years ago

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America Owes Us for the Ongoing Destruction of Afrikan Life! Reparations Now!

From the New Afrikan People’s Organization and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement

The New Afrikan People’s Organization is a revolutionary organization dedicated to independence and socialism for Afrikan descendants in the U.S. empire. NAPO is also committed to Pan-Afrikanism and anti-imperialist solidarity.

The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement is the mass association and political action wing of NAPO. MXGM is committed to self-determination, reparations, human rights for New Afrikan people and opposes sexism and genocidal policies of the US empire.

As Pan-Africanists and anti-imperialists, NAPO and MXGM stands firmly in solidarity with the struggle of Afrikan and indigenous peoples for reparations internationally as well as inside the United States. The following statement outlines our understanding of both the importance of an international struggle for reparations for our people’s and other people’s centuries long struggle to end colonial domination and slavery.

What are Reparations?

Reparations are compensation for damages inflicted on groups or individuals. The responsible party attempts to bring peace and justice by compensating the afflicted party. Reparations are an established principle in international law. The international community has held violators of human rights responsible to redress the damages it was responsible for. For example, Germany was forced to pay Israel because of its genocidal practices against Jewish people in the 1930’s and 1940’s and Iraq was forced to compensate Kuwait after the Gulf War. The United States government agreed to compensate Japanese Americans for internment in concentration camps and seizing their property during the second World Imperialist War (a.k.a. World War II).

Why Should Afrikans in the United States receive reparations?

The history of Afrikans in the United States (U.S.) is an indictment against the U.S. government in terms of violations of human rights and genocide. The U.S. government is responsible for compensating Afrikans who descendants of those Afrikans are who were held captive in North America. For twenty-five years (1783 to 1808), the United States allowed Afrikans to be legally brought into its borders. They received import duties on each captive Afrikan brought to its shores during that time. In winning its war of independence from England, the U.S. decided to maintain a system of slavery with Afrikans as its primary labor force. Despite continued individual and collective resistance by Afrikans, the American system of slavery created physical, psychological and social damage on the Afrikan population.

After slavery was declared illegal (except for punishment for “crimes”), the Americans institutionalized a system of colonial apartheid called segregation or “Jim Crow” which limited the life chances and the social and economic development of the Afrikan population in North America. From the 1870’s until the early 1920’s, the American government allowed terrorist violence against Afrikans to go virtually unchecked by its “law enforcement.”

While the American government has declared its brand of apartheid illegal, this system is so institutionalized it is maintained in most aspects of social life in the United States, including the economic system, health care, housing, and education. Afrikan people are disproportionately targeted for police harassment and mass incarceration. White supremacy continues to affect the political, economic, and social life of Afrikans in the U.S.

Is the Demand for Reparations a new issue?

After the American Civil War, Afrikans began to demand land as a form of compensation for years of unpaid labor. The slogan “Forty Acres and a Mule” is rooted in this aspiration. Fear of an Afrikan uprising for land existed throughout the southern American states. In Virginia, Tennessee and Georgia, American troops put down attempts by Afrikans to seize land.

In the 1890’s there were several efforts by Afrikans to achieve reparations. The National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief Bounty and Pension Association, headed by Callie House and Isaiah Dickerson, was a southern-based reparations movement possessed over 10,000 members. Henry McNeal Turner, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church, called for reparations to allow our people to repatriate to Afrika.

Queen Mother (Audley) Moore represents the most tireless worker for Afrikan reparations in the Afrikan descendant movement in the U.S. A former member of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and the Communist Party of the U.S., Queen Mother began to advocate reparations in the 1950’s. She convinced Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X to include it in the program of the Nation of Islam. She also convinced other nationalists, including Imari Obadele, founder of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika, Oserjiman Adefumi, the founder of Oyotunji Village in South Carolina and leader of the Yoruba and traditional African religious revival movement in the U.S., as well as, Muhammad Ahmad (Max Stanford) of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), to advocate reparations. Inspired by Queen Mother Moore, Black Power organizations like the Revolutionary Action Movement, Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and the Black Panther Party advocated reparations. Most national Black Power gatherings endorsed the concept of reparations. After the Black Economic Development Conference called for reparations in 1970, activists like Jim Forman initiated a direct-action campaign targeting predominately white Christian churches demanding reparations. This forced white denominations to direct funds to Afrikan communities.

Since 1987, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (NCOBRA) has led the effort to achieve reparations for Afrikan descendants in the United States. NCOBRA is a united front of activists who advocate reparations. The Lost Found Nation of Islam, under the leadership of Silas Muhammad, has initiated efforts to gain international support for reparations. From 1989 until his tenure in the United States Congress ended in 2017, Representative John Conyers submitted H.R. 40, a bill to study reparations in the House of Representatives. The Conyers bill has never made it out of the Judicial committee to the floor of Congress. Several city governments, including Atlanta and Detroit have passed resolutions in support of reparations. The 2000 release of the book The Debt: What America Owes Blacks by human rights advocate Randall Robinson re-introduced the demand reparations in popular discourse. Journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates 2014 article “A Case for Reparations” invigorated the dialogue in the United States.

Global developments

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the movement towards the 2001 World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa increased international momentum of African peoples towards reparations. The struggle resulted in a resolution in which the United Nations declared the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade “A Crime Against Humanity.” This was considered a significant victory for the reparations movement. Unfortunately, two events disrupted the forward motion.

First, three days after the conclusion of the conference, the attacks on September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington D.C., overshadowed the victory at the WCAR for U.S. based reparations activists. Secondly, the follow up Conference Against Racism in Barbados was divided by a conflict over including people of white European origin in the conference. Despite these setbacks, Afro-descendant movements in South America, notably Brazil and Venezuela, have achieved momentum post-Durban.

Additionally, a significant blow to the international reparation movement occurred after the U.S. sponsored coup in 2004 of the Lavalas government headed by Jean Bertrand Aristide in Haiti. The Aristide government had demanded twenty-one billion dollars in reparations from France, which had coerced Haiti to compensate the French government for its liberation from French colonialism. The demand for restitution remains a popular demand in Haiti despite the kidnapping of President Aristide and his seven-year banishment from Haiti.

The 2013 CARICOM countries 10 point-plan for reparations from European countries is an important development in re-asserting the demand for economic justice and for respect for the lives and humanity of our Ancestors. It also inspired reparations advocates inside the U.S. empire.

What type of redress does NAPO and the MXGM argue should be sought?

There are various proposals for reparations. The relationship between Afrikans and the United States has been an experience of conflict. The New Afrikan People’s Organization (NAPO) and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) argue that Afrikan people and the United States will never have peace until reparations have been achieved on certain fundamental levels. The U.S. is in denial in terms of its crimes against the Afrikan population within its borders. Just as individuals engaged in therapy, America must first recognize its role in the oppression. The United States must acknowledge its violations against Afrikan people. Admitting to its role and apologies are not sufficient acts of justice. Acknowledgment of its human rights violations is a prerequisite to action to resolve the conflict between the United States and Afrikans.

Most reparation proposals offer financial compensation to Afrikans in America in terms of monetary payments, tax relief, or support for education. While all of these are valid there are other elements of redress which NAPO/MXGM and other forces in the New Afrikan Independence Movement are concerned. We do not believe compensating individuals thousands of dollars is a meaningful way to heal the damages experienced by Afrikans in America. Given the current balance of power and capitalist economic arrangements, individual stipends would primarily stimulate the American economy not empower the Afrikan community. We are concerned with reparation proposals that encourage our collective development and enable our people to ensure our future. The first things that our enslaved Ancestors lost were their identity and freedom. After the end of chattel slavery, our Ancestors were never allowed to choose their national identity or their relationship to the government, which sanctioned their captivity and enslavement. We should be allowed to determine what a free existence is for us, through a plebiscite. A plebiscite is a vote taken by a people to determine their national will. Some of us would prefer to be U.S. citizens. Some would prefer to be repatriated to Africa. Those of us in the New Afrikan Independence Movement desire an Afrikan government in North America on territory that our Ancestors were enslaved on and forced to work without compensation. As part of our compensation, the United States should honor and respect our right to self-determination, our choices of how We want to be free. The United States should not deny us the right to organize a vote to determine how We wish to be free nor should the US attempt to manipulate that vote. After We determine our respective choices the United States should be obligated to fulfill our demands of freedom. This is real justice!

Another form of redress is for the United States government to release all political prisoners, and prisoners of war and allow all Afrikan political exiles to return to North America, if they choose to do so. The war the United States waged on the Afrikan freedom struggle in this country is the reason political prisoners, prisoners of war and exiles exist. No real redress can exist while there is captivity or isolation of Afrikan freedom fighters.

How does NAPO and the MXGM think reparations will be achieved?

Frederick Douglas once said, “power concedes nothing without a demand.” The United States will not give us anything unless it is forced to. We might still be in slavery if our Ancestors did not strike for their freedom during the American Civil War. Without active struggle, Afrikans would not be able to vote or enjoy other things now considered basic rights in the U.S. empire. Reparations will only be achieved through a massive movement by Afrikans militantly challenging the empire. If We don’t seriously fight for it, We will never get reparations or anything else important to our existence.

We must as a people reach a consensus on reparations. As We reach a consensus, We must challenge the imperialist state on reparations. If We are serious about reparations We will not allow business as usual to occur within the empire until We get it. Without reparations, we won’t have justice and without justice for our Ancestors, and ourselves, We shouldn’t allow the U.S. empire to live in peace. This is the only way We will achieve reparations.

FREE THE LAND! RESIST SETTLER COLONIALISM AND US IMPERIALISM!

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