© AP/Victor BoyntonMalcolm X two weeks before his death
Malcolm X, unlike Martin Luther King Jr., did not believe America had a conscience. For him there was no great tension between the lofty ideals of the nation - which he said were a sham - and the failure to deliver justice to blacks. He, perhaps better than King, understood the inner workings of empire. He had no hope that those who managed empire would ever get in touch with their better selves to build a country free of exploitation and injustice. He argued that from the arrival of the first slave ship to the appearance of our vast archipelago of prisons and our squalid, urban internal colonies where the poor are trapped and abused, the American empire was unrelentingly hostile to those
Frantz Fanon called "the wretched of the earth." This, Malcolm knew, would not change until the empire was destroyed.
"It is impossible for capitalism to survive, primarily because the system of capitalism needs some blood to suck," Malcolm said. "
Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now it's more like a vulture. It used to be strong enough to go and suck anybody's blood whether they were strong or not. But now it has become more cowardly, like the vulture, and it can only suck the blood of the helpless. As the nations of the world free themselves, then capitalism has less victims, less to suck, and it becomes weaker and weaker. It's only a matter of time in my opinion before it will collapse completely."
King was able to achieve a legal victory through the civil rights movement, portrayed in the new film "Selma." But he failed to bring about economic justice and thwart the rapacious appetite of the war machine that he was acutely aware was responsible for empire's abuse of the oppressed at home and abroad. And 50 years after Malcolm X was
assassinated in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem by hit men from the Nation of Islam, it is clear that he, not King, was right. We are the nation Malcolm knew us to be. Human beings can be redeemed.
Empires cannot. Our refusal to face the truth about empire, our refusal to defy the multitudinous crimes and atrocities of empire, has brought about the nightmare Malcolm predicted. And as the Digital Age and our post-literate society implant a terrifying historical amnesia, these crimes are erased as swiftly as they are committed.
"Sometimes, I have dared to dream ... that one day, history may even say that my voice - which disturbed the white man's smugness, and his arrogance, and his complacency - that my voice helped to save America from a grave, possibly even fatal catastrophe," Malcolm wrote.
Comment: Collectively, governments around the world are asking people to pretend these homeless human beings don't exist! There is something seriously wrong with this type of thinking - it's completely inhumane. It is in human nature (for some) to want to help another who is suffering. Why has it become criminal to help another human being?
The Greatest Epidemic Sickness Known to Humanity