Tag: Cornel West

The Long and Difficult Process

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WestDay 23 of our Lenten Journey through Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech.

I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.    

Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.

Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.

Four: Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government.

Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.
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Excerpts from a recent Democracy Now interview with Dr. Cornel West of Union Theological Seminary:

…by “neoliberal,” what I mean is, when you see a social problem, you financialize, you privatize and militarize. You have mass incarceration on the one hand, privatized schools…and then you militarize, which is to say drop bombs on seven Muslim countries and then wonder why Muslims are upset, or you drop bombs on innocent children with U.S. drones and then wonder why the gangsters, the fascists coming out of the Muslim world, are organizing. And, of course, we’ve got to be anti-fascist across the board. But this is going to be the most trying of times in our lifetime. There’s no doubt about it. And at 63 years old, I am thoroughly fortified for this fight. I’ll tell you that.

… Unfortunately, given the right-wing populist and authoritarian orientation of Trump, he uses that kind of anguish to scapegoat Mexicans, Muslims and others, rather than confront the most powerful. Twenty-one percent of those who voted for Trump do not like him, but they feel as if they had no alternative. And we have to keep in mind, 42 percent of our fellow citizens didn’t go to the polls at all, already given up on the system, you see. And so, the system itself now is in such a chronic crisis. And we said before the election that Trump would be a neo-fascist catastrophe. And it’s very clear from his picks that he’s moving in that direction.

Deodorized Discourse

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

cornelFrom Dr. Cornel West in Black Prophetic Fire (in conversation with and edited by Christa Buschendorf, 2014):

The central role of mass media, especially a corporate media beholden to the US neoliberal regime, is to keep public discourse narrow and deodorized.  By “narrow” I mean confining the conversation to conservative Republican and neoliberal Democrats who shut out prophetic voices or radical visions.  This fundamental power to define the political terrain and categories attempts to render prophetic voices invisible.  The discourse is deodorized because the issues that prophetic voices highlight, such as mass incarceration, wealth inequality, and war crimes such as imperial drones murdering innocent people, are ignored.   Continue reading “Deodorized Discourse” →

Catastrophe

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Cloud of Witnesses1 Comment

cornel-westCornel West on the four persistent American catastrophes that Martin Luther King identified at the end of his life:

Militarism is an imperial catastrophe that has produced a military-industrial complex and national security state and warped the country’s priorities and stature (as with the immoral drones, dropping bombs on innocent civilians). Materialism is a spiritual catastrophe, promoted by a corporate media multiplex and a culture industry that have hardened the hearts of hard-core consumers and coarsened the consciences of would-be citizens. Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. Arbitrary uses of the law — in the name of the “war” on drugs — have produced, in the legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s apt phrase, a new Jim Crow of mass incarceration. And poverty is an economic catastrophe, inseparable from the power of greedy oligarchs and avaricious plutocrats indifferent to the misery of poor children, elderly citizens and working people.

The Black Prophetic Struggle Against Injustice

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Cloud of Witnesses, Subverting Empire1 Comment

By Tommy Airey
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The great irony of our time is that in the age of Obama the grand Black prophetic tradition is weak and feeble.
Cornel West, Black Prophetic Fire (2014)

The Union Theological Seminary professor & prominent American public intellectual Dr. Cornel West has teamed up with Christa Buschendorf, the professor and the chair of American Studies at Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt am Main, for the newly released Black Prophetic Fire from Beacon Press, a series of extended conversations on six compelling prophetic leaders: Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, Ella Baker (above), Malcolm X & Ida B. Wells. It is a well-timed buffet for people of faith & conscience yearning to eat at the table of a nutritious historic tradition that will energize & sustain subversive lifestyles within the context of 21st century American Empire. Continue reading “The Black Prophetic Struggle Against Injustice” →