Ajamu Baraka delivered this speech at the opening of the 2024 United National Antiwar Coalition Conference.
All power to the people! All power to the people! This call that we make is not a call just as an empty slogan. But it reflects a historic objective. It reflects the kind of objective we all have to strive for. Because without power residing with the people, we can't make any kind of changes. So we have to remind ourselves why we are here. Why we, in fact, struggle. And so this evening, this is going to be sort of the beginning of a celebration, if you will. As Joe Lombardo just indicated, we are here at a very historic moment.
There's something different this evening than in any of the past UNAC conferences, in my opinion. Why? Because we are facing a situation that suggests to many of us that there's no turning back in terms of the intensification of the anti-imperialist movement here in this country.
The fact that we have been imposed on, if you will, to be complicit, to a certain extent, in the barbarity, the savagery that we have witnessed in Gaza. It is a situation that is dehumanizing. But like most social processes, there's a contradictory element here. That is, it provides us an opportunity to ensure that people understand the true nature not only of Gaza, and the savagery we see in Gaza, but also the true nature of the Western imperial project. That, while the project has been able to give itself an aura of respectability – using ideological instruments, like humanitarian interventionism and the responsibility to protect–what Gaza has done, my friends, is to expose the true nature of this project. It has shown us that, basically, these forces are prepared to blow up the entire world in order to maintain their global hegemony.
So what does that say for us? It means that we can no longer allow for innocence. We have a responsibility to lay out in clear unequivocal terms what we're up against, and to begin to advance a vision of what needs to be constructed. So we have to call out the enemy for what the enemy really is. We say in UNAC, we say in the Black Alliance for Peace, that what we are up against is a Pan-European colonial capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchy and it must be defeated.
Now we recognize that we have different tendencies here at UNAC and that's a good thing. One of the things though, we have to talk about folks is in terms of eliminating innocence is for people to begin to understand and for us to articulate this, and that is that the enemy is not motivated just because of some kind of connection or some kind of commitment to evil. The enemy has a material objective. And that objective is to maintain global hegemony to maintain objectively if you will, white power. And so it's not about convincing these forces to do the right thing. It is understanding the motivations that are driving their policies. And that's incredibly important because when you understand that that is the objective, there, you will find yourself being diverted with all kinds of unimportant diversionary arguments as to how we change consciousness, we understand that material force can only be overthrown by material force. And that has to be understood.
So, my friends, this weekend, we need to discuss and to debate. But we also have to be absolutely honest, in terms of what we're up against. If we're not able to organize ourselves and engage in more effective coordination, then we will find ourselves in a situation where we can not see the end of 2024. Now, that's not, in my opinion, a dramatic statement in the sense that, you know, we have to make sure people understand not only the complexity of the global moment, but the danger of this moment. That with the amateurs making policy in the US, with Antony Blinken, saying just a couple of days ago, once again, that Ukraine will be part of NATO it is quite clear that these folks are driving policies that could very well end up in a nuclear conflagration, a nuclear confrontation that none of us are going to be able to survive.
And so we have to be honest with the people. Again, we have to hope that people can understand. And we have to help them to understand the nature of this moment, and what we have to do. So this evening, this weekend, we will discuss, we will debate. But even with all of the challenges that we are facing, we also want to remind ourselves that with the people organized, with power shifting from the enemy, to the people, then there's always the possibility of success, always the possibility of human transformation. And that as revolutionaries and anti-imperialists, our responsibility is to embody that positiveness to advance the vision of what we can be, and to advance that vision with boldness and confidence.
So our friends, thank you all for coming out this evening, coming out this weekend, and let's keep at the forefront of our awareness, the historic responsibility we have going forward to not only win this short-term struggle, but win the struggle to transform ourselves and to transform our realities and to build a new world. All power to the people!
Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S.-based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition.
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