John Dolva

2 bits. Craig, I have no photo qualifications. All I have experience in using a variety of cameras as an amateur. This is certainly enough to disqualify me from commenting but as so many, no doubt a number with less experience, are commenting I see no reason why I shougn't as well. I have said before that I think you are an asset to the forum ( a bit abrasive, but, hey, who's perfect ). Through looking through the lenses of many cameras and telescopes and playing around with comp modelling plus a kind of 3d 'sense' that comes from an interest in various artforms where one of my favourites is sculpting (wood and clay) ( also harkening back to my early years studying civil engineering and the associated maths and physics ) I reiterate the previously expressed sentiment (by me ). I see no inconsistencies as outlined by others whether it be the by photos or your avatar.

Havana. September 8, 2011 CIA-created Alpha 66 celebrates its 50th anniversary in Miami Jean-Guy Allard WITH a communiqué widely circulated in Miami among partisans of the use of terror against Cuba, Ernesto Díaz Rodríguez, chief of the Alpha 66 announced the upcoming 50th anniversary of the FBI-protected terrorist group "as an organization with a frontal combat strategy." This in the country which publishes a controversial list of countries sponsoring terrorism. Díaz Rodríguez notes that since Alpha 66’s founding in September 1961, the group has followed its objective of maintaining a total independence from governments and foreign interference, and fighting under the motto of "not asking permission from or waiting for anybody." However, archives reveal the exact opposite. Alpha 66 is a CIA front created precisely in that year when the agency was stimulating to the tune of millions of dollars so-called autonomous operations from its Miami JM/WAVE station, then the largest in the world. The plan was to organize groups which had supposedly emerged spontaneously among Miami exiles who had fled Cuba due to their complicity with the bloody Batista dictatorship, in order to increase attacks on the island while denying any relationships with such acts. The criminal acts include numerous attempts on the life of the Cuban President; pirate attacks on fishing vessels; and death threats to people linked to Cuba in Mexico, the United States, Ecuador, Brazil, Canada and Puerto Rico, ONE OF THE MOST DANGEROUS ORGANIZATIONS In those years, Miami police intelligence documents described Alpha 66 as "one of the most dangerous and active organizations in Miami." Since the death of its former leader, Nazario Sargen, Alpha 66 has been led by Ernesto Díaz Rodríguez, aged 66, who signed the abovementioned communiqué. Trained by the CIA in the Dominican Republic, Díaz was captured in the Cuban province of Pinar del Río on December 4, 1968, during a failed armed infiltration, and was imprisoned for perpetrating acts of terrorism. On his release, he returned to the United States and attached himself to various known extremists like Eusebio de Jesús Peñalver Mazorra, René Cruz Cruz and Mario Chanes de Armas, with whom he conspired to commit criminal acts. In 1999, working with the same individuals, he was involved in a plot to assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. His right-hand man, Osiel González Rodríguez, was trained by the CIA in Fort Benning, where he studied sabotage techniques alongside Posada Carriles, Félix Rodríguez Mendigutía, Jorge Mas Canosa and other members of the Miami terrorist mafia. Luis Posada Carriles has taken part in many of Alpha 66?s activities, including public ones, both before and after his El Paso trial, with which Washington is attempting to grant him immunity. Reinol Rodríguez, linked to a number of Posada’s crimes and an accomplice in the murder of Carlos Muñiz Varela in Puerto Rico, is the self-styled military leader of Alpha 66. The terrorist organization continues to openly promote terrorism from its offices at 2250 Southwest 8th Street in Miami, while the Department of State continues to issue its list of countries sponsoring terrorism with the evident intention of slandering, defaming and demonizing nations which reject its domination. http://www.granma.cu/ingles/international-i/8sept-CIA-created.html PRINT THIS ARTICLE

roughly (line) assuming a center of gravity over (his) right foot it seems the movements are for balance

This is more like it. : therefore one must see ALL events as involving the Emipre and therefore they have a meaning understood by understanding this very point: this is about an OLD history that if known would indeed blow them out of the water. so, this must not happen and Rupert is a very skilled squirrel at the helm. Things do not/will not happen without a reason.

Ok, that's cool, Tom. I think we reached an impasse last time re Che'. I'm certainly interested in learning more. Another day. ----------- Just to refocus on Agrarian Reform. One event that may be relevant as an indicator of future events is Venezuelas new approach re its gold and the steps it has taken and what it recommends. A large part of it is a matter of seizing land through nationalisation. No doubt this will have some impact in some way on some matters. There is I suppose also the historic events in playing out in Chile where there is a call for the re-nationalising of the copper mines.

http://www.ehow.com/about_5117340_definition-spot-gold.html Definition of Spot Gold Spot gold is a commonly used standard for the value of an ounce of gold. ... http://www.kitco.com/charts/livegold.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4a9uP4A9ic

The French acted on an april agreement re oil.

spot gold prices: There have been a few odd pattern as of late. A spike to 1900, then a drop and an about four day wiggle around 1830 and then a bit of a surge at 3 am NY time 2n'd sep. I wonder what caused these particular apparent markers . What's to be expected?

You gotta laugh

http://www.scribd.com/doc/15758113/Invisible-Eagle-Nazi-Occult-History

Anyway the notion that Agrarian Reform is really the one to refute, not Che' per se. Tom, I disagree with much of your analysis on Che'. It's a bit simplistic. I think Michels contribution supports that contention. Also you are misrepresenting events to fit a particular pov. (though his life is certainly an interesting puzzle to put together. These allegorical boy scouts (which is an interesting notion in itself considering lbjs' connection to them, even through Baden Powell to Cecil Rhodes and on to masonry and supremacy and racism considering in particular that among the CIA assets in the Congo were Nazi uniformed mercenaries. re those interested in Che', there are a number of writings by him, he appeared to be a continuous recorder of events, a bit like Trotsky really, like the hard to get manual on guerilla warfare to his musings on 'the new man' and his many diaries, speeches and interviews) were part of a system that massacred striking miners at the same time. Do you really think that these foreign led and staffed hunting squads would balk at bending the action of the long ground down campesinos? this is really a subtext to this topic to another convo we had on this some time ago. I think in the end all Che' could really do was to leave an example that might take decades to be realised. He certainly captured the hearts of generations. Kordas photo of him is the most reproduced image ever. There's their story and our story just like for Che' there is their America and Ours. btw I haven't spoken with Fidel as of late. Could you ask him about this sending Che' off because he was too idealistic?) edittypo

Is it known what format this questioning will have? Will they be under oath, testify separately and who will question them?

I hope so.

http://www.kitco.com/charts/historicalgold.html

Why, it is gone, and the cuffs are being slapped on, before anyone is even inclined to grab a pitchfork. At least the Syrian population is well aware that the water is too warm, and many have already hopped out of the pot. Almost everyone in the post industrial societies expects that someone else will do it for them, or they have become too distracted to care. I expect there will be no real concern until it is no longer permissible to post on a thread like this one, or even have access to do it. Impregnable, aggressive, and unresponsive is the authority we are up against. Alternatives seem few, relocating in retirement seems an attractive idea for us older folks. A long shot is to go all out in support of Ron Paul, give him a crack at dismantling/de-funding some of the state security apparatus, even as his domestic policies further concentrate wealth, and the pain of the have nots. If Paul can knock any of it down, and at the same time, motivate enough of the still sleeping to wake up and fight back, at least it will be a fight against a less impregnable, plutocratic security apparatus. Sounds like a desperate hope to me, Tom. I really think the answer lies in all wage slave class members throughout the world forming a united front that fights the real enemy. This of course means having channels of communication open, by any means necessary. I think the failure in Wisconsin shows clearly that a reliance on the government to ultimately solving things is futile. There are lessons there for the union movements, similarly a study of labor history, which is covered by many topics on this forum, is helpful re tactic and strategy. These fights have been fought before. There are many lessons to be had. Perhaps the most important being : if you don't fight, you lose.

[Reprinted from British socialist website www.counterfire.org .] Libya: Dictator loses, but who wins? Tuesday, August 23, 2011 By John Rees Libyans celebrate unconfirmed reports Gaddafi has been captured, Tripoli. There will be no tears for the end of the Gaddafi regime, if that is indeed what we are watching. The Gaddafi regime was a brutal dictatorship and it deserved to be overthrown just as much as that of Ben Ali’s in Tunisia or Mubarak’s in Egypt. But, unlike the defeat of Ben Ali or Mubarak, the end of the Gaddafi has not been brought about mainly by a popular revolutionary rising. It has been brought about by a military victory in a civil war in which the rebel side has become largely dependent on western military fire power. So the question now posed is this: in whose interest will the new rulers of Libya act? NATO is already saying that it will work with the Benghazi-based Transitional National Council. This, more of a threat than a promise, should be no surprise. The point of the western intervention in Libya was to gain a foothold in the fast moving Arab revolutions and to create a compliant regime by making it militarily and economically dependent on the west in a way in which, say, the Tunisian unions or the Youth Coalitions of Egypt could never be said to be. So the major powers will be looking for payback. They will want an Arab regime which is a home for western military bases. They will want a regime that is supportive of Israel (and the TNC has already made supportive statements in favour of the ‘war on terror’). And they will want a Libya that is safe for BP, Shell and other western corporations, whether from the oil industry or elsewhere. The US, Britain and France will be making the most of the refurbishment of the "humanitarian intervention" argument. This was first used in the Balkan War of the late 1990s but was comprehensively disgraced by its exposure as a fraud in the Iraq and Afghan wars. Now Syria and others can expect this cover for western imperial goals to gain a renewed lease of life. The Palestinian cause, up to now a beneficiary of the Arab Spring, will face a more confident enemy if the major powers are strengthened ideologically by the fall of Gaddafi. In the Western countries we should immediately demand that the imperial powers live up to their own propaganda: Cameron, Sarkozy and Obama all said that this operation was simply about saving civilian lives. The course of military operations proved this false. But, nevertheless, the NATO powers should now get out of Libya. Their task, by their own definition, is over. It should be left to the Libyan people to determine their future. William Hague, the British Foreign Secretary, has talked of sending troops to "keep the peace" in Libya. That should never happen: Iraq surely shows us the kind of failure that awaits any such scheme. These aims of the Western powers may be hard to realise since although the TNC has become the creature of the imperialists it is by no means a stable entity. Indeed the pressures within it created by western tutelage resulted in a bloody feud in which the military commander of the rebels was killed only a few weeks ago. And there is some sentiment among rebel supporters in Benghazi that the western powers need to go as soon as Gaddafi has been defeated. Dima Khatib, one of the best commentators on the Arab Spring, reported from Benghazi a few weeks ago. She recorded this interchange: "The sign behind her reads: Thanks France. As I was taking a photograph of it, a woman came up to me in Benghazi's version of Tahrir Square and said: 'We are all Sarkozy'. "I said: 'Oh really? What do you think of Sarkozy suggesting that Gaddafi resigns but stays in Libya?' "She did not even think for a minute before she said: 'No No... That is none of Sarkozy's business. Gaddafi's fate is our business, us, the Libyan people'. "Another lady hurried towards me to say: 'We thank the US and France for what they are doing. But they have no say here in things. They should just give us the air cover we need to march to Tripoli. "'We Libyans will do it ourselves. We shall liberate Libya from the tyrant and we Libyans shall decide his fate'." Of course, such sentiments considerably underestimate the persistence of the imperial powers. They are like unwelcome dinner guests -- very easy to invite, very hard to get to leave. But still this mood is a factor that persists from the earliest days of the revolution when "We can do it alone, no western intervention" billboards were seen across Benghazi. It will make life more uncertain for any future pro-Western regime in Tripoli. And there is one other unpredictable effect. The Western powers may get the regime they want in Libya, but the fall of Gaddafi will be seen by many in the Arab world as another victory for the revolution. This is an illusion because the main beneficiaries of the fall of Gaddafi will be the major powers and it will encourage them in further interventions in the Middle East. But sometimes illusions have secondary positive effects. And this illusion may encourage those who are fighting in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain and elsewhere. In the coming weeks, the fate of the Arab revolutions will depend on how the balance of renewed imperial confidence and sustained revolutionary enthusiasm works itself out. [Reprinted from British socialist website www.counterfire.org .] Real News report: NATo tries to control Libyan revolution. From GLW issue 892 --------------------- Questions over Libya's future after fall of dictator Sunday, August 28, 2011 By Tony Iltis People celebrate the fall of Gaddafi in Tripoli. Another Arab dictator is gone. But the nature of the fall of Muammar Gaddafi raises questions about the nature of the new regime that will emerge, and to what extent it will truly reflect the interests of Libya's people. On August 21, forces of the National Transitional Council (NTC) entered Tripoli and claimed victory against the forces that remained loyal to Gaddafi. A week later, loyalist forces continued to hold out in the dictator's home town, Sirte, and in pockets around Tripoli. But Gaddafi's 42-year reign is over. NTC and NATO spokespeople were initially upbeat. The NTC claimed that while Gaddafi was still at large, they had captured three of his sons, including high profile regime spokesperson, Saif al-Islam. This was “confirmed” by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Luis Moreno-Ocampo. However, that evening Saif al-Islam Gaddafi visited the Rixos Hotel, then still under loyalist control. “I am here to refute the lies,” Saif al-Islam announced to the astonished journalists. “We broke the back of the rebels. It was a trap. We gave them a hard time, so we are winning.” If nothing else, this incident demonstrates the statements of no side in the conflict can be taken at face value. Much of what is happening in Libya are extremely difficult to determine from outside the country, but it is clear that much of what is being claimed is untrue. One such claim is that the overthrow of Gaddafi was the accomplishment of an internal people’s movement, like the overthrow of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. There was such a people’s movement in Libya, erupting in February and March in the wake of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. However, it is unclear to what extent the NTC’s calls for Western assistance were representative of this movement. These calls led to the UN Security Council’s March 17 “No Fly Zone” resolution that was the pretext for NATO's attacks. From the outset, recent defectors from the regime were the most in favour of Western intervention. Initially these were mainly diplomats, and their voices were unsurprisingly well represented in the international media. The defections of senior military and political figures gave the opposition some military forces and weapons. This, and Gaddafi’s use of military force against protesters, meant the character of the uprising began to change from a mass protest movement to a civil war. In Tripoli, regime security forces silenced the protests. The defection of General Abdul Fattah Younes put the second biggest city, Benghazi, in the hands of the opposition. Islamist groups already waging a low-intensity insurgency in the south and east of the country joined the opposition. Placards opposing outside intervention continued to be visible at protests. But by March 17, the superior firepower of Gaddafi’s heavy artillery had made the fall of Benghazi seem imminent. The abundance of French and US flags at rallies suggests the call for air strikes was popular in that city. France, Britain and Italy led the international campaign for intervention. They worked closely with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) a grouping of Saudi Arabia and the smaller oil monarchies in the gulf. They began promoting the NTC, which regime defectors, dissidents and insurgent commanders had set up, as an alternative to Gaddafi’s regime. The GCC sent token forces — Qatari warplanes — to join the NATO strikes against Libya, ostensibly in support of democracy there. At the same time GCC forces, predominantly Saudi, invaded Bahrain to help its monarchy to brutally crush democracy protests. Libyan ambivalence about foreign intervention was one reason why the NATO mission was officially restricted to air, missile and drone attacks, with no ground forces. However, some NATO special forces were probably covertly fighting with the rebels even before the air strikes were authorised. Another reason was to get the diplomatic consent of Russia and China at the UN Security Council. Also, the US-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have left the West militarily overstretched and the financial cost — the US has spent US$4 trillion on occupying Iraq and Afghanistan — is a significant contributor to the West’s economic woes. Such financial and domestic political considerations help explain why the US played a secondary role to the European NATO powers in the Libya intervention. NATO succeeded in negating Gaddafi’s superiority in fire-power, taking pressure off Benghazi and allowed the rebels to counter-attack. Various towns on the road between Tripoli and Benghazi changed hands from time to time, but the conflict essentially became a war of attrition. NATO’s hope was that, as Gaddafi was unable to crush the rebels, and economically, diplomatically and militarily isolated, his regime would implode and Gaddafi would be overthrown by his henchmen who would then negotiate peace with the NTC. Western diplomats, in rejecting a number of peace plans from the African Union and Latin American countries, made clear that there was no place for Gaddafi in a future Libyan government (despite the UN resolution being framed as protecting civilians, not regime change). This was later reinforced by charges being brought in the International Criminal Court. However, what remained of the Gaddafi regime did not collapse as hoped. Defections to the NTC largely ceased. Furthermore, the very real foreign aggression, and the NTC’s apparent collusion, helped subdue opposition to Gaddafi in Tripoli. NATO's attempts to use air strikes to assassinate Gaddafi only succeeded in killing some non-politically involved family members, along with other civilians. After five months, Western leaders were under pressure from domestic politicians concerned about the costs of another open-ended military engagement and from the leaders of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). Pepe Escobar wrote in the August 24 Asia Times Online: “NATO started winning the war by launching Operation Siren at Iftar — the break of the Ramadan fast — [on August 20]. ‘Siren’ was the codename for an invasion of Tripoli. “That was NATO’s final — and desperate — power play, after the chaotic ‘rebels’ had gone nowhere after five months of fighting Gaddafi’s forces.” The August 25 Guardian said: “Rebel leaders had been hoping that the people of Tripoli would rise up against Muammar Gaddafi, but after a bloody crackdown crushed local opposition they began planning their own revolt. “British military and civilian advisers, including special forces troops, along with those from France, Italy and Qatar, have spent months with rebel fighters, giving them key, up-to-date intelligence.” Once the assault on Tripoli began, the Guardian said: “An increasing number of American hunter-killer drones provided round-the-clock surveillance. “Covert special forces teams from Qatar, France, Britain and some east European states provided critical assistance, such as logisticians, forward air controllers for the rebel army, as well as damage-assessment analysts and other experts … “Foreign military advisers on the ground provided real-time intelligence to the rebels.” NATO air strikes were coordinated with the NTC’s assault. The pretext for NATO's intervention was that it was necessary to save civilian lives. How many people Gaddafi may have killed in an assault on Benghazi if NATO hadn’t intervened cannot be known. In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad has shown he share’s Gaddafi’s willingness to use military force, including heavy artillery, to crush protests. There is no reason to believe that when Assad’s forces brutally retook cities such as Hama they showed any more restraint than Gaddafi would have had he retaken Benghazi. AP reported on August 17 that in Syria, “various human rights groups … say more than 1,800 civilians have been killed since the uprising erupted in mid-March.” On June 9, Reuters reported that the UN Human Rights Council was estimating the death toll in Libya at 15,000. NATO's intervention failed to stop civilian casualties — these continued, at the hands of both Gaddafi's forces and NATO itself. Despite the collapse of Gaddafi's regime, casualties are still mounting as street fighting and NATO air strikes continue. A Scottish nurse working in a Tripoli hospital told the BBC on August 26 that her hospital was having difficulty coping with what were the highest casualties since the conflict began. War crimes are reported to have been committed by both sides. On August 26, the BBC said that at least 17 prisoners were executed by loyalist forces abandoning Gaddafi’s Bab al-Aziziya fortified headquarters. “Meanwhile, the bodies of at least a dozen pro-Gaddafi fighters — two of whom had their hands tied behind their backs — were found on a roundabout in the centre of Tripoli,” the BBC said. The West attacked Libya because the appeals of the defecting generals for air strikes gave the West an opportunity to reassert its role in the region in the face of the Arab Spring uprisings. This was a gamble and the results are not yet clear. The West is pushing NTC head Mustafa Abd al-Jalil, who was Gaddafi’s Minister of Justice until February 26, as the new Libyan leader. A “Friends of Libya” meeting on September 1 in Paris, organised by the leaders of France and Britain, will seek to map out Libya's future. It will involve 30 countries, with the stated aim of the NTC “guiding” its decisions. How it will be received inside Libya, including by rank-and-file rebels who risked everything in their fight, is unknown. The five months during which Gaddafi’s artillery pounded the rebel-held parts of the country and NATO air strikes pounded the government-held areas has created deep divisions. Looting after the fall of Tripoli added to the easy availability of military grade weapons. There are divisions within the NTC, as the July 28 assassination of General Younes and subsequent fighting between rival rebel militias showed. Libyans need peace. To this end, NATO should cease air strikes immediately and Western military intervention must end. However, the August 25 Guardian said: “The western advisers are expected to remain in Libya, advising on how to maintain law and order on the streets, and on civil administration, following Gaddafi's downfall … “The role of Nato is likely to continue to be significant.” From GLW issue 893 stay tuned...

William, there are a number of illogical trains of thought and omissions in your response, imo. You presume things regarding my position on matters for a start, that's personal. I really do not want to let this call for African Unity to degenerate into a pointless exchange. I have always considered your input to be valuable in some way. This evening (oz time) I'll try to address some of the relevant points you raise as pertaining to the topic.

Ok, I guess that's the best I can hope for for now. Thank you. Of course there is bias. My bias is for the respect of the sovereignty of nations and against the type of hypocrisy that continues to legitimise dictators where it suits: ie there is no interest in the Libyan people here at all. It's a whitewash of events that have far more to do with economics. The western concept of somehow knowing best and having the right to impose that on others is also racist, just as Apartheid South Africa and Apartheid Israel. Why is your enthusiasm so caught up in this particular event? There are far more pressing problems in Africa that there are many Africans working for a solution to. When you write America and Americans who exactly are you referring to?

Could you rephrase that without any presumptions re hate please, William?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtDUk6t6M64 Bomfunk MC's, "Freestyler" (Live In Finland 2000)

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=8233&view=findpost&p=233659

http://www.pambazuka.org/en/ South African food sovereignty campaigners move to occupy land Ronald Wesso (2011-08-18) Ronald Wesso reports on the Food Sovereignty Campaign in South Africa, which is taking steps towards agrarian reform and food sovereignty through land occupations.

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/48635 on the book 'Malcolm X: Live like him! Dare to struggle, dare to win!' Sunday, August 28, 2011 By Barry Healy Malcolm X strode through the US political landscape of the late 1950s and early '60s, towering over his times with his burning righteousness and intelligence. “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing,” African American revolutionary Malcolm X, assassinated in 1965 at the age of 39, once said in a comment on the capitalist media that might be describing contemporary reporting on English riots or refugees. Malcolm, who increasingly saw the link between capitalism and racial oppression in the last years of his life, commented that “you can't have capitalism without racism”. “You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker,” said the man once described as the only Black man who “could stop a race riot … or start one”. Malcolm X strode through the US political landscape of the late 1950s and early '60s, towering over his times with his burning righteousness and intelligence. Malcolm was a hugely influential figure and inspiration for the radical movement for Black liberation that grew in the late 60s. “His aura was too bright,” Manning Marable, author of an important new biography of the African American revolutionary, quotes the poet Maya Angelou on her meeting with Malcolm. “A hot desert storm eddied around him and rushed to me, making my skin contract, and my pores slam shut.” Malcolm had that effect on people; in the case of white America it generated violent hatred and official conspiracies that played a part in his assassination. In the Black community, his withering polemics against racism converted masses to the Nation of Islam (NOI) religious sect — and later attracted a new generation of activists who wanted to follow him towards a radical vision for a United States' revolution. The NOI preached Black pride, but combined it with an appeal to separation from white America. This meant their fierce defence of NOI members (not the entire Black community) was joined with a passive political approach that offered no way forward. Mixed with a violently toxic internal discipline, the NOI was an arena in which someone of Malcolm’s acumen could only grow for a while. But it inevitably prove constricting as the civil rights movement surged forward in the early '60s. The power of Malcolm's developing militant thinking was such that a New York Police Department (NYPD) officer assigned to listen to the countless microphones that bugged every aspect of Malcolm’s life found himself, against his will, convinced that he was talking the truth about US and offered a way forward. That story and more tumble out of this meticulous examination of Malcolm’s life from his impoverished childhood, through his hustling years of petty crime, conversion to the NOI during his 1946-'52 stint in prison, his rise as a radical preacher in Harlem and his final frantic period of trying to map out an alternative path for Afro-American liberation allied to the rising African revolutionary wave. This, for Marable, was Malcolm’s “life of reinvention”. The story has been told before in Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X. But Marable has harnessed the resources of Columbia University’s Malcolm X Project to dig into nearly every moment of Malcolm’s life to produce what will become the standard reference. Nearly all paragraphs are buttressed with an entire matrix of sources to verify Marable’s claims, and some remarkable assertions are made. Important details differ from Haley’s narrative — which was based on conversations with Malcolm and published after Malcolm's assassination in 1965. Haley explains Malcolm’s rupture with the NOI in '63-64 as caused by the hypocritical womanising of Elijah Muhammad, which certainly did play a role. But Marable raises Malcolm's growing discussions with, and attempts to find a way to relate to, the growing civil rights movement. Malcolm was concerned with ways to fight racism, not simply denounce it. One example Marable gives relates to the 1962 attack by Los Angeles police on an NOI mosque, murdering one man and paralysing another. In all, seven Black Muslims were shot. The survivors were framed up on serious charges. Malcolm seriously attempted to organise a squad that would assassinate members of the Los Angeles Police Department in retaliation. Elijah Muhammad vetoed this operation. Malcolm saw the limitations of the NOI framework, leading to the conflict that drove him out of the NOI. After officially leaving the NOI in March 1964, Malcolm began the two great travels that changed the nature of his religious and political thinking. He travelled twice to Africa and the Middle East, including a Hajj to Mecca, converting to orthodox Sunni Islam in the process. He also travelled downtown in New York City and met with the Trotskyists of the Socialist Workers Party. In Africa, Malcolm saw the growth of pan-African, anti-colonial radicalism and he conceived a plan to generate an equivalent in the US. With the Trotskyists, he discussed the possibilities of revolutionary action in the US, welcomed their paper sellers at his meetings and addressed their public forums. He also reached out to other radicals in the States. All the while, he had to live on the run. The NOI wanted him dead because his example threatened to overshadow that of Elijah Muhammad. Marable’s narrative becomes a little scattered at this point because Malcolm was sleeping in different places and keeping low. However, fascinating snippets emerge. Shortly before his death, Malcolm had a private meeting with legendary Argentinean-born revolutionary Che Guevara, a central leader of the Cuban Revolution. If we are lucky, perhaps a record of the meeting is kept on file in Havana. Another detail is one of Malcolm’s body guards recalling that towards the end, he was hungrily devouring German philosopher Hegel’s account of the master and the slave in Phenomenology of Spirit. It is a philosophical explanation of the creation of the slave mentality, something that had always formed a centrepiece of Malcolm’s rhetoric. But Malcolm was fated to not bring that broader philosophical tradition to his audience (as Afro-Caribbean revolutionary Frantz Fannon did with Black Skin, White Masks). Some of the new details revealed by Marable are of a personal nature. Marable reveals that Malcolm included some homosexual hustling in his petty crime days — something that never appeared in Haley’s book. The Malcolm that emerges in Marable’s account is more human and stark than the saint of the Autobiography. Yet he is all the more inspiring for it. Ordinary humans, with all their failings and faults, can walk in the footsteps of this Malcolm. Marable reveals Malcolm’s misogyny, for example. Malcolm had a disrupted relationship he had with his parents. His father was murdered by racists and his mother driven insane by the pressures of raising a raft of children single-handed while constantly harassed by racist officials. Malcolm was left with a sense of abandonment and an inability to trust women, which resulted in his tendency to disregard them. Among the behaviours this produced in the adult Malcolm was his habit of leaving home for extended political journeys immediately after his wife, Betty Shabazz, gave birth to each of their children. In the final year of his life Malcolm started to develop his thinking. After his visit to Africa and the Middle East in 1964, Malcolm said: “In every country you go to, usually the degree of progress can never be separated from the [position of the] woman... “I am frankly proud of the contributions that our women have made in the struggle for freedom and I’m one person who’s for giving them all the leeway possible because they’ve made a greater contribution than many of us men.” Malcolm's developing views led him to appoint a woman to head the Organization of Afro-American Unity, the secular political movement he set his hopes on. At the time of his assassination, Malcolm was having an affair with an 18-year-old woman, and there is a strong inference that she was complicit in the murder. Marable details the entire NOI conspiracy to kill Malcolm in February 1965. But he also exposes, in detail, the evidence that points to the NYPD and FBI as being equally responsible. The brutality of the murder, recounted with forensic precision, is sickening. Equally repulsive is the brazenness of the NYPD refusal to properly investigate it. In fact, one of the hit men who pumped bullets into Malcolm could very easily have been a cop. The NYPD and the FBI refused Marable access to their files. Malcolm X’s monument is the revolutionary struggle of the Black masses, in the US and Africa. In the US, I once heard a chant at a demonstration that is amplified through this book: “Malcolm X, live like him! Dare to struggle, dare to win!” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmzaaf-9aHQ&feature=player_embedded Malcolm X gives a speech at Oxford University in 1964: ‎'We are living in a time of revolution, a time when there has got to be a change. The people in power have misused it, and now a better world must be built ... And I, for one, will join in with anyone, I don't care what colour you are, as long as you want a change to the miserable conditions that exist on this Earth. From GLW issue 893

Thank you, Greg.