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FREEDOMWAYS          FOURTH QUARTER 1969

in Frederick Douglass' words "would disgrace a nation of savages." It would indeed be naive to assume that there are not other such "incidents" which will perhaps be uncovered at some future date. The events at Songmy, or Pinkville as it was officially designated by the military brass, are akin to the mentality which produced the war crimes of Nazi Germany.

To shoot, terrorize the population, and then offer protection is a style as old as the system of colonialism itself. The painful reality is that the United States is the chief continuer of that style in the world today. President Nixon attempts to reassure the American people by commenting that some 250,000 churches, temples, and pagodas have been built in Vietnam by the marines this year. U.S. bombers have destroyed the prosperous rice economy of Vietnam and black marketing has further distorted the economic life of the Vietnamese people, but thousands of churches and temples are being built. This is so completely in the colonialist tradition it hardly needs any comment.

Throughout its nearly 200-year history as a society of corporate greed and exploitation the United States of America has been only half-civilized at best. The further brutalization of life and culture in our country is one result of the Vietnamese War which will be felt for a long time. We are witnessing one of its immediate results on the home front in the murderous search-and-destroy missions being carried out by local police against members of the Black Panther Party from Connecticut to California. A second prominent example is the Fascist-like "trial" of Bobby Seale and his co-defendants in Chicago charged with organizing peaceful demonstrations during which the police rioted at the time of the National Democratic Convention.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the same time of his famed Riverside Church speech warned the nation that, in his words, "the American government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." This warning was expressed one year to the day before he too was gunned down by an assassin. Yet these words ring louder and clearer than ever in the wake of the events at Songmy. Despite this timely, perceptive appraisal, we in the Afro-American community still have our role-playing, hustler element among those who call themselves Black Nationalists, peddling the illusion that the growing nation-wide movement against the war in Vietnam is none of black folks' concern. This fawning, subservient mentality is now being packaged in supposedly militant phraseology about "doing our own thing." In terms

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-15 11:24:16