The Poli-Tricks of Loving our Enemies

Perhaps one of the most diabolical psychological operations deployed against people of Africa ancestry was our exclusive indoctrination into the ethic of unconditional love for our enemies. This ethic, supposedly rooted in the New Testament teachings of the Christ, purports that it is possible to love even those who are actively concocting a final-solutions that will culminate in our total extermination.

It is hard to conceive of a belief that is more self-destructive than the doctrine taught to our ancestors which promoted turning of the other cheek and nonresistance in the face of violent aggression. Generations of Black people have been schooled in this philosophy every week withing the various denominations of Christianity. We have been taught to pray for those who despise us and use us for their own nefarious purposes.

The great Dr. Martin Luther King, following his natural instinct for self-preservation, was quite content to resort to more traditional methods of self defense in his earlier days. Not only did Dr. King own a few fire arms but he also applied unsuccessfully for a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Dr. King clearly understood at one point in his life that it was necessary to literally fight fire with fire.

The doctrine of unconditional love for the enemy and the absolute commitment to the idea of nonviolent resistance evolved in Dr. King’s thinking as a result of his association with Bayard Rustin and others who were impressed by what Mahatma Gandhi had been able to accomplish in India using the tactic of non-violent resistance. It should be noted however that Gandhi did not rule out the use of violence. In 1924 he was quoted as saying that violence was preferable to cowardice.

People of African ancestry are the only group of people who have been systematically indoctrinated into passive acceptance of brutality. Buddhists, Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and Caucasian Christians have a long and glorious history of taking up the sword and making the soil red with the blood of their enemies. From the first century until recently Christians and Jews have been spilling each other’s blood in Europe. The Crusades were religious wars fought between Christian and Muslim armies.

After the late Osama bin Laden was assessed to have been the master-mind behind the terrorist attack against the US in September 2001, there was no talk among Caucasian conservative Christians about turning the other cheek or about praying for Osama and his network of Muslim freedom fighters. When members of Hamas shoot a few rockets from Gaza into Jewish occupied areas the response from the Israeli army is swift, brutal, and deadly.

Ironically the Bible that was given to our ancestors by the colonizers does not support the doctrine of non-violent resistance. The Jews of Old Testament fame when they were not committing outright acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing were always at war with the ‘cursed’ descendants of Ham referred to in the Bible as the Canaanites. David, the distant ancestor of the Christ of the New Testament, was such an apex killer that the deity of the Old Testament refused to allow him to build the Jewish temple because he had shed too much blood.

People of African ancestry are obligated to love only those who love us. While we should we willing to live peacefully with other ethnic groups who are equally willing to live at peace with us, we should have no compunctions about taking up arms against those who are threatening us or are seeking to exploit and exterminate us.

Our exceedingly great ancestor Malcolm X (may he always be honored and remembered) instructed us that it is our duty to defend ourselves when confronted by violence that is motivated by racial hatred. People of African ancestry have the same right of self-defense and self-protection as is exercised by people of every other ethnic group. A clear message needs to be sent to all and sundry that there are dire consequences to be experienced when Black life and Black existence is not respected.

Increasingly it is becoming obvious to people of African ancestry that the religious bill of sale given to our ancestors was nothing more than a clever deception designed to make them and us their descendants, complicit in our own subjugation and suffering. There is no army of extraterrestrial coming from the sky to fight our battles for us. Like our brethren in Haiti during their revolution, we are the ones who will have to fight to win greater freedom in our day. The sooner we realize this, the sooner we can get down to the serious task at hand.

Lenrod Nzulu Baraka is the founder of Afro-Caribbean Spiritual Teaching Center and the author of The Rebirth of Black Civilization: Making Africa and the Caribbean Great Again.

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