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Book Review The naked truth, pure and simple

JAMIE JOHNSON recommends a no-holds-barred Black perspective on the miscreation that is the ‘America’ of today

The Black Agenda
Glen Ford
OR Books, £15.99

 

GLEN FORD was an experienced independent journalist steered by what he described as a black-left perspective. He was a Marxist, primarily concerned with the welfare of black people but never shying away from castigating the US history of imperialism and racism.

This collection of speeches and written work is uncompromising in its assault on the US attempt to “pillage the world with impunity,” re-enact the white man’s burden and impose its corporate mastery of the planet.

His critique of Thanksgiving, a “supremely white American holiday, the most ghoulish event on the national calendar... the most loathsome, humanity-insulting day of the year,” is a joy to behold. This affront to civilisation that celebrates the genocide of Native Americans by the European pilgrims whose god blessed every atrocity they committed is nothing less than “a pure glorification of racist barbarity.”

Ford persistently criticised and challenged members of what he called the American “black misleadership class.” Leading figures in the Black Lives Matter movement were dismissed as “role models of impotence, a chattering, swaggering class of self-servers.” Most black faces in high places were deemed to have brought “betrayal on an unprecedented scale.”

Special ire was reserved for the first black president of the US, “the more effective, not lesser, evil,” who was deemed responsible for ultimately “corrupting the black American tradition of radical politics.” Like many a British Labour Party politician, Obama carried out the policies of the ruling classes while appearing to oppose them.

Their 44th president continued the custom of being in hock to banks and militarists and “blithely broke every international law and covenant in the book while playing the globalist.”

Although Obama was arguably responsible for making endless war palatable black Americans seemingly became more concerned with protecting the “artificial aura of blackness that he brought to the White House” than demanding radical policies based on justice for all.

When Ford said “power to the people” he meant utterly disempowering the capitalists and white supremacists. He regarded a black-latino urban alliance as essential to withstanding capitalism’s onslaught.

For him, movements were about amassing people power and not merely collecting promises from politicians.

Both Democrats and Republicans were dismissed as “rich men’s parties playing tag-team” with one ruling class agenda. Ford saw through the anti-Russian hysteria that surrounded Trump’s election and recognised that Bernie Sanders had removed stigma from the word socialism, but lambasted him as a “world-class imperialist pig in foreign affairs.”

Ford highlighted the disaster capitalism that followed Hurricane Katrina into New Orleans. He understood it as another example of the state and corporate juggernaut “remaking urban America in white-face,” scattering African American communities and diluting inner city black political power.

He examined the US as the headquarters of international terror and detailed its role in Rwanda and Uganda’s genocidal pillage of Congo. He noted that jihadists have been “the footsoldiers of imperialism” and a tool of US policy since the last days of Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

His analysis was reliably astute and accurate. He knew that finance capital is incapable of regulation and stood firmly on the side of socialism against barbarism.

His work was a direct challenge to the corporate-owned media that is hand in glove with domestic and international spy agencies. There are moments of repetition in this collection but it is a challenging, entertaining and informative book throughout.

Glen Ford died in July 2021. If you want to put a voice behind his words, episodes of the Black Agenda Report, which he hosted, can still be found online.

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