Workers World in 1965
Published Feb 23, 2008 10:52 PM
Editor’s note: Workers World is in its 50th year of publication.
Throughout the year, we intend to share with our readers some of the
paper’s content over the past half century. The following article was
originally published in the issue dated Feb. 25, 1965—four days after the
shooting of popular Black Muslim leader Malcolm X during a rally at the Audubon
Ballroom in New York. Malcolm was for Black self-determination and self-defense
and was opposed to the war in Vietnam waged by the U.S. government.
Malcolm was killed
by the racist masters
of the USA
They are same ones who assassinated
Lumumba and same ones whom
Malcolm fought all his life
Workers World , Feb. 25, 1965
The bullet that stilled the voice of Brother Malcolm X came from the arsenal of
imperialist white supremacy. No matter whose was the hand that pulled the
trigger, the missile was guided by the same sinister forces who assassinated
Patrice Lumumba and his heroic lieutenants in the Congo.
The vicious perpetrators of the most sadistic violence against the Black People
have struck again–and this time at a most vital spot. They have struck
again, while their class brothers of press and radio hold up their hands and
moralize about “violence”–not the violence of the assassins,
but the alleged violence of their victim!
The ruling class that boasts of the greatest array of violence in the history
of mankind, the class that has not hesitated to use that violence on the
disarmed and the helpless throughout the earth, has struck again–and at
one of its most important individual targets.
Malcolm was a leader of the oppressed, one who called for self-defense against
the violence of the oppressor and organized the masses with a view to standing
up against this violence and ultimately beating it.
Like [Congolese leader Patrice] Lumumba, he had to be removed. The imperialists
will let nothing stand in the way of their drive to rule whatever portion of
the earth they can. And the time they could do this peacefully or
“democratically”–if it ever did exist–is now long
past.
The government has failed to quench the fires of the Black Freedom movement
with the tepid milk-and-water “civil rights law.” It has failed to
bribe the movement’s real leaders. It has failed to beat the movement
into submission–either in Alabama or in Brooklyn or Harlem. So it has
taken the path of provocation, conspiracy, frame-up–and
assassination.
It cannot dispose of the ideas of the most militant leaders of the
oppressed, so it must try to eliminate their persons.
The depraved, sadistic stooges of the ruling class have been murdering the
lesser-known, unsung heroes of the oppressed for centuries. But now the U.S.
racist masters have gone in for murdering the leaders.
The ruling class has even launched upon a program of government by
assassination because its own ranks are torn by the upward thrust of the
oppressed peoples.
In the case of John F. Kennedy and [U.N. Secretary General] Dag Hammarskjold,
the assassinations were directed at a so-called “moderate” wing of
the oppressor class. In Malcolm’s case, it was directed at a
militant wing of the oppressed class.
In both cases, the racist, militarist rulers of the United States have the same
aim–to divide and rule the masses and to set the country more firmly on
the road to war.
The Kennedy assassination revealed the extreme instability of the ruling class
and its tendency to resort to the most violent solutions in its internal
faction fights. Even before this, the mysterious death of Dag Hammarskjold in a
plane accident while he was apparently pursuing a too “mild” line
in the Congo raised strong suspicions in Europe and Africa that the CIA had
really arranged his demise.
But the assassination of Malcolm reveals, like the phony “Statue of
Liberty bomb plot,” that far more is now afoot within the country than
just a faction fight of the big bosses. The intrigues, frame-ups, wiretaps and
conspiracies against the oppressed that have become so commonplace, have given
way to bursts of police violence, clubbings, shootings–and
assassinations.
We live under such a system and are ruled by such brigands that it is
inevitable that, frustrated by failure with other methods, they unleash the
kind of violence Malcolm often exposed before he fell victim to.
The papers, as usual, turn everything upside down. Malcolm was fond of saying
that they invariably make the criminal look like the victim and the victim
appear to be the criminal. So it is with Malcolm’s own death.
Every single editorial writer for the imperialist racists has managed to say in
one way or another that Malcolm “died as he had lived–by
violence” or that he “lived by the sword and he died by the
sword,” etc. It might almost be as though it was Malcolm who had
assassinated someone, rather than the other way around, so persuasively do
these highly paid agents of the racist ruling class write their obituaries.
One might almost think that these meek and gentle newspapers were not
absolutely foaming at the mouth over a few youngsters in Harlem last summer.
One might almost think that they all stood up in union to condemn Officer
Gilligan and ask his removal from the Force for his act of murderous violence
against a 15-year-old boy!
The hypocrisy and the lies are hard to expose. Malcolm’s murder is being
covered up by the very same forces that murdered him–the racist rulers
and their penmen, policemen and politicians. But murder will out. The
real murderers will be brought to justice.
And Malcolm’s struggle for the line of militant self-defense of the Black
People against the violence of imperialism will be vindicated, not least of
all, by his own martyrdom.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
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