One has to abandon hope — to wake up to now — a comment regarding Professor Hamid Dabashi's insight about the United States

© 2018 Peter Free

 

16 June 2018

 

 

Professor Hamid Dabashi (at Columbia University) often writes wisely

 

Regarding the death of hope for the United States:

 

 

I am no longer sure there is any hope for this country - and that now appears to me the best thing about the US - the categorical failure of a universal experiment.

 

As a promise, the US has historically failed - and the sooner we realise that the more realistic our assessment of our global condition will be.

 

Barack Obama was the last nostalgic miscarriage of a historical promise. He turned out to be far more like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton than Bobby Kennedy or MLK.

 

What emerged from the deliverance from Obama's false dawn was the shining sun of Malcolm X who today brightens the deepest hopes of this nation more convincingly than ever.

 

Nostalgia for those bygone years is only compelling if you don't see what is in front of you today. Today the Black Lives Matter movement [see here] is infinitely more rooted in history, more embracing in its historical imagination, and worldlier in its understanding of the geopolitics of the world than the Civil Rights movement ever was.

 

No doubt Black Lives Matter stands on the shoulders of MLK and remembers Robert Kennedy somewhat fondly, but it dreams in decidedly and enduringly Malcolm X's terms.

 

© 2018 Hamid Dabashi, Fifty years and a Trump later: The promise of America 1968 - 2018, Al Jazeera (15 June 2018) (excerpts)

 

 

Malcolm X

 

As a young person, during Malcolm's life, I thought his perspective was more realistic than Martin's. Today, that's still true.

 

See, for example:

 

 

here — highlighting Malcolm's promptings to stand up for oneself

 

and

 

here — agreeing with Ajamu Baraka regarding King, Malcolm and resistance against the enslaving state.

 

 

Regarding hope — as an impediment to realism

 

A Buddhist concept says that hope acts like spiritual poison. This means that hope alters one's focus from how things are now to an imaginary future. Hope distracts. Losing hope sets us free to perceptively see and realistically prod circumstances as those immediately exist.

 

This is Professor Dabashi's point about our propagandized United States. No one is going to magically save us from a System designed to repress.

 

 

The moral? — Rattling cages makes more sense — than hoping that the System is going to change or fix itself

 

This is the difference between:

 

 

Martin Luther King Jr's approach — using non-violent protest to (i) motivate a change within oppressors' hearts and then (ii) hoping for a favorable evolution in their behavior

 

versus

 

Malcolm X's — tearing chunks of power from oppressors' asses and exerting that seizure (so to speak) to directly enforce one's own independence and dignity.

 

 

In short, don't ask the Malefactor Class to change. Good will is not in their nature.

 

Instead, accurately observe the chinks in their power and precisely ram your own down their soulless throats.