State of Dis-Union, Discombobulation, Dyslexia and Downright Dummkopfization
… Disneyfication, Infantilization, Cosctcoization, Walmartization now Amazonification and AI-Infestation, Until a Stiff Arm Glory be daily by the extras in today’s 1984 Redux
Feb 20, 2026
Robeson and Parenti . . . Bageant
Of course, it is a freak show, for sure, with Room Temperature IQ’s squirming in their seats after years of buggering. By whom?
Jewish Zionist Howard Lutnick’s firm bought up the rights to tariff refunds for 20-30 cents on the dollar in 2025.
Today, the Supreme Court struck the tariffs down. For every $100 invested, Lutnick’s family just made 3-5x.
Howard Lutnick is arguably one of the slickest and most corrupt operators in modern finance.
We now know he was close friends with Jeffrey Epstein, despite his previously denying it. That link was confirmed in the Epstein files. He also has documented ties to Tether and Bitcoin market manipulation.
Now, a brand new scheme has surfaced involving Cantor Fitzgerald, run by one of his sons.
The firm has been buying the rights to U.S. tariff refunds at massive discounts.
Here is how this scam works:
1. U.S. companies paid billions in tariffs that were later ruled illegal.
2. Cantor approaches those companies and offers immediate cash: 25 cents for every dollar they are owed.
3. Companies take the money to avoid waiting years for litigation and bureaucracy.
4. When refunds are issued, Cantor collects the full dollar.
They bought claims at 25 cents on the dollar. After today’s Supreme Court ruling, those claims could be worth 80 to 90 cents.
It’s worth noting that Lutnick also literally helped architect the tariff regime. He pushed Trump to implement it, likely knowing it would collapse and create this exact arbitrage opportunity.
The potential payout is in the billions. This is insider-level extraction hiding in plain sight.
Welcome to the Jewish scam that is MAGA.
Look, it isn’t antisemitism to point out the Catholics on the Supreme Court, or the Jews in the White Man’s House: Or in the case of Jew York City!!!!!!!!
Mamdani’s budget includes $94 million for police drones and other surveillance tech.
For Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist elected New York City’s first Muslim mayor, promising to keep Jessica Tisch as police commissioner was a key campaign gesture, given his past stance on defunding the police. For many Jewish New Yorkers, still shaken by rising antisemitism since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks and uneasy about a shifting discourse on Israel, Tisch offers a sense of stability and reassurance.
Fucking hell, the Jewish Handlers: At least four members of the Tisch family contributed to a super PAC that backed former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s failed mayoral bid in the primary; Cuomo ran for mayor as an independent in the general election. According to Forbes, the Tisch family gave $1.2 million to the anti-Mamdani Fix the City super PAC.
The family name was originally Tichinsky when her ancestors immigrated to the United States from Ukraine in 1904, later shortened as a nickname when her great-grandfather Avraham was cheered as a captain of the City College of New York’s basketball team.
Her father, James Tisch, serves as president of the Loews Corporation, which the family has led since the 1950s; their fortune is estimated at $10 billion. Her mother, Merryl, is the former chair of the New York State Board of Regents and a longtime leader in Jewish philanthropy. She now serves as chair emeritus of the Met Council on Jewish Poverty.
As a student at Harvard, Tisch was involved with Chabad. After graduating from Harvard with degrees in law and business, she married Dan Levine, a venture capitalist, whom she met at Harvard. The wedding at Central Synagogue in Manhattan was officiated by her grandfather, Rabbi Philip Hiat, a Reform rabbi known for his interfaith work. He served as a police chaplain in the New York City Housing Authority Police Department.
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Yeah, that Muslim Mutant , , ,
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A little end of the month black history?
In 1946, WWII veteran Maceo Snipes was shot in the back by the KKK the day after he became the first Black person to cast a vote in Taylor County, Georgia.
After he was shot, Mr. Snipes walked three miles to the hospital with his mother. For six hours, doctors left him waiting and bleeding. By the time he was seen, he needed a blood transfusion. The doctors said the hospital had no “black blood.” Snipes died two days later.
This is why I will vote in every election. The day I stop voting is the day I stop breathing.
MAGA MAGA MAGA: If a six-year-old Black girl integrated a whites-only elementary school escorted by the federal marshals.
Then your kids are old enough to learn her story as white parents chanted death threats and chased her with a coffin w/ a Black baby doll in it.
Oh, the irony: Cobwebs Technologies (now owned by PenLink) has recommended that its products be used to spy on Black Lives Matter activists.
Firm selling Israel’s spy tech woos Europe’s cops
Who woulda thunk?
“I have long been in sympathy with the Negro struggle for total citizenship, therefore I would find an appearance of any sort before a segregated house completely incompatible with my moral concepts…indeed repugnant.” —
Dan Blocker’s telegram to the Mayor of Jackson, Mississippi in 1964, regarding the “Bonanza” cast appearing at the Jackson State Fair.
Goddamn I’m glad y’all set it off
Used to be hard now you’re just wet and soft
First you was down with the AK
And now I see you on a video with Michel’le?
Lookin’ like straight Bozos
I saw it comin’ that’s why I went solo
And kept on stompin’
When y’all motherfuckers moved straight outta Compton
Livin’ with the whites, one big house
And not another nigga in site
I started off with too much cargo
Dropped four niggas now I’m makin’ all the dough
White man just rulin’
The Niggas With Attitudes, who ya foolin’?
Y’all niggas just phony
I put that on my mama and my dead homies
Yella Boy’s on your team, so you’re losin’
Ay yo Dre, stick to producin’
Callin’ me Arnold, but you been-a-dick
Eazy-E saw your ass and went in it quick
You got jealous when I got my own company
But I’m a man, and ain’t nobody helpin’ me
Tryna sound like Amerikkka’s Most
You could yell all day but you don’t come close
‘Cause you know I’m the one that flowed
Ya done run 100 miles, but you still got one to go
With the L-E-N-C-H M-O-B, and y’all disgrace the C-P-T
‘Cause you’re gettin’ fucked out your green by a white boy
With no Vaseline
The bigger the cap, the bigger the peelin’
Who gives a fuck about a punk-ass villain?
You’re gettin’ fucked real quick
And Eazy’s dick, is smellin’ like MC Ren’s shit
Tried to tell you a year ago
But Willie D told me to let a hoe be a hoe, so
I couldn’t stop you from gettin’ ganked
Now let’s play big-bank-take-little-bank
Tried to diss Ice Cube, it wasn’t worth it
‘Cause the broomstick fit your ass so perfect
Cut my hair and I’ll cut them balls
‘Cause I heard you like givin’ up the drawers
Gang-banged by your manager, fella
Gettin’ money out your ass, like a motherfuckin’ Ready Teller
Givin’ up the dollar bills
Now they got the Villain with a purse and high-heels
So don’t believe what Ren say
‘Cause he’s goin’ out like Kunte Kinte
But I got a whip for ya Toby
Used to be my homie, now you act like you don’t know me
It’s a case of divide-and-conquer
‘Cause you let a Jew break up my crew
House nigga gotta run and hide
Yellin’ Compton, but you moved to Riverside
So don’t front, MC Ren, ‘cause I remember when you drove a be B210
Broke as a mothafuckin’ joke
Let you on the scene to back up the First Team
It ain’t my fault, one nigga got smart
And they rippin’ your asshole apart
By takin’ your green, oh yeah
The Villain does get fucked with no Vaseline
I never have dinner with the President
I never have dinner with the President
I never have dinner with the President
And when I see your ass again, I’ll be hesitant
Now I think you a snitch
Throw a house nigga in a ditch
Half-pint bitch, fuckin’ your homeboys
You little maggot, Eazy-E turned faggot
With your manager, fella
Fuckin’ MC Ren, Dr. Dre, and Yella
But if they were smart as me
Eazy-E would be hangin’ from a tree
With no Vaseline, just a match and a little bit of gasoline
Light ‘em up, burn ‘em up, flame on
‘Til that Jheri curl is gone
On a permanent vacation, off the massa plantation
Heard you both got the same bank account
Dumb nigga, what you thinkin’ ‘bout?
Get rid of that Devil real simple, put a bullet in his temple
‘Cause you can’t be the Nigga 4 Life crew
With a white Jew tellin’ you what to do
Pullin’ wools with your scams, now I gotta play the Silence of the Lambs
With a midget who’s a punk too
Tryna fuck me, but I’d rather fuck you
Eric Wright, punk, always into somethin’, gettin’ fucked at night
By Mista Shitpacker, bend over for the goddamn cracker, no Vaseline
Motherfuckin’ nosejob having ass
Motherfuckin’ Jheri curl lite
Ambi wearing motherfuckin’ bitch
Lyrics:
Too many best rappers, not enough best rhymes tho
Guess I’m delusional, used to doing it all the time so
Maybe I’m just jaded, out of touch and unrelated
Unable to connect greatness based on the person who makes it
Or maybe I just hate it
And that would make me hater
Maybe it is great but that don’t mean it’s greater
Having your profile raised doesn’t make you a raiser
Being ambiguous with assertions, isn’t making you safer
What you mean tho?
Line us up, paddling us on the back
Like we steamboat you, president of the frat
You goin’ sling toast, like you Ringo
And you think Doc Holliday’s
Just goin’ tolerate and too sick to let that thing go
It’s just a matter of returns
Ashes to ashes, scattered them from the urns
To start a fire shaky to gather them from the burned
And reassemble these ashes, the blackness is something firm
Then moving blackness backwards in the bread of some other shit
Any deep we spreadin’ wheat seeds from a bucket shit
McDonald had a farm and he lovin’ it
Rolls Royce of the scented voice against the arms of the government
Artist gettin’ robbed for their publishing
By dirty Jewish execs that think his alms from the covenant
I’ll retire when I’m tired, that’s a Firestone death
Easy to say when nobody’s there, like a microphone check
They wanna hear what I’m gon’ say before the microphone check
Make me sign an NDA before the microphone test
Let you face that type of faith, institutional opposition
Then with all due respect, you are not my competition
Nah
Joanne Bland passed yesterday, a lifelong civil rights activist and legend the Selma movement. At age 8, she became the youngest person ever jailed for civil rights protests. She was arrested at least 13 times for nonviolent protest action by age 11.
CORNEL WEST: You can’t talk about wealth and inequality, you can’t talk about education, you can’t talk about massive unemployment and under employment and you can’t talk about drones being dropped on people in other parts of the world without talking about white supremacy and its ways in which it operates. It doesn’t have to be overt. The president is right about that.
But too many black people are niggerized. I would say the first black president has become the first niggerized black president.
CNN ANCHOR: What do you mean by that?
WEST: A niggerized black person is a black person who is afraid and scared and intimidated when it comes to putting a spotlight on white supremacy and fighting against white supremacy. So when many of us said we have to fight against racism, what were we told? ‘No, he can’t deal with racism because he has other issues, political calculations. He’s the president of all America, not just black America.’ We know he’s president of all America but white supremacy is American as cherry pie.
We’re talking about moral issues, spiritual issues, emotional issues. White supremacy has nothing to do with just skin pigmentation, it has to be what kind of person you want to be, what kind of nation we want to be. Democrats and Republicans play on both of those parties in terms of running away from the vicious legacy of white supremacy until it hits us hard. Thank God for Ferguson. Thank God for the young folk of all colors. Thank God for Staten Island and fighting there. Thank God in Baltimore, now the precious folk in Charleston.
- “The government gives them [African Americans] the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”
- After September 11, 2001, he said: “We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”
- “It just came to me within the past few weeks, y’all, why so many folks are hating on Barack Obama. He doesn’t fit the model. He ain’t white, he ain’t rich, and he ain’t privileged. Hillary fits the mold. Europeans fit the mold, Giuliani fits the mold. Rich white men fit the mold. Hillary never had a cab whiz past her and not pick her up because her skin was the wrong colour. Hillary never had to worry about being pulled over in her car as a black man driving in the wrong… I am sick of Negroes who just do not get it. Hillary was not a black boy raised in a single parent home, Barack was. Barack knows what it means to be a black man living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people. Hillary can never know that. Hillary ain’t never been called a nigger. Hillary has never had her people defined as non-persons.”
- Bill Clinton “did the same thing to us that he did to Monica Lewinsky.”
We got a paranoid group of patriots in power that now, in the interests of Homeland Stupidity – I mean Homeland Security, ‘scuse me – they are taking away the Constitutional right of Free Speech because it’s “harmful to the interests of national security” – and those interests equate God with Government. Our money says In God we Trust, and our military says we will kill under the orders of our Commander-in-Chief if you dare to believe otherwise. We are still confusing God and Government in the year 2003, just like confused Luke 19. Well, in case you are in that great number, and I understand from the polls that the number has gone up, still confused; if you are in that number of confused folk 2000 years after Christ, let me share three quick things with you just to help clear up your confusion. Turn to your neighbor and say, and listen you got to say it right, say it with attitude and with Ebonics, say “He fitting to help somebody tonight.” Turn to the other side and say “fitting to”.
Governments – number one – Governments lie.
This Government lied about its belief that all men were created equal. The truth was they believe all White men were created equal. The truth is they did not believe that even White women were created equal, in creation or in civilization. The Government had to pass an amendment to the Constitution to get White women the vote. Then the Government had to pass an “Equal Rights” amendment to get equal protection under the law for women. The Government still thinks a woman has no rights over her own body, and between Uncle Clarence – who sexually harassed Anita Hill – and the closeted clam court that is a throwback to the 19th century, hand-picked by Daddy Bush, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, hung between Clarence and that stacked court they’re about to undo Roe v. Wade, just like they’re about to undo affirmative action. The Government lied in its founding documents and the Government is still lying today. Governments lie.
Turn to your neighbor and say “Governments lie”. The Government lied about Pearl Harbor. They knew the Japanese were going to attack. Governments lie! The Government lied about the Gulf of Tonkin – they wanted that resolution to get us into the Vietnam War. Governments lie! The Government lied about Nelson Mandela, and our CIA helped put him in prison and keep him there for 27 years. The South African Government lied on Nelson Mandela. Governments lie! Turn back to your neighbor and say again “Governments lie.” The Government lied about the Tuskegee experiment; they purposely infected African-American men with syphilis. Governments lie! The Government lied about bombing Cambodia, and Richard Nixon stood in front of the camera, “Let me make myself perfectly clear, we are not –“ Governments lie! The Government lied about the drugs for arms Contras scheme, orchestrated by Oliver North and then they pardoned – the Government pardoned – all of the perpetrators so they could get better jobs in the Government. Governments lie!
The Government lied about inventing the HIV-virus as a means of genocide against people of color. Governments lie! The Government lied about a connection between Al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein, and a connection between 9/1-1/01 and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Governments lie! The Government lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq being a threat to the United States’ peace. And guess what else? If they don’t find them some Weapons of Mass Destruction, they’re going to do just like that LAPD and plant them some Weapons of Mass Destruction. Governments lie!
But I’m fitting to help you. I’m fitting to – turn to your neighbor, say “He fitting to help us.”
The power of propaganda had the whole world believing the guy in the tank was the victim
For all Rothschilds satanists and pedos
BLACK HISTORY:
Ninety? Think 600!!!!!!!!!!!!!
white men are exactly who they want you to think black men are.
Rest in peace, Robert Mugabe: Hero, villain, human. He helped build Zimbabwe and helped destroy it.
Fucking hilarious:
PSYCHOSIS of WHITENESS: The President of the IOC Kirsty Coventry declared that if the US attacks Iran, then the latter will be banned from participation in the Olympics for its unprovoked war of aggression.
In 1921, a white supremacist mob, aided by the U.S. National Guard, attacked the thriving Black community of Tulsa, U.S
At least 300 were killed, and over 1,000 were injured in what became known as the Black Wall Street Massacre
This is how the media chose to report it.
The Great Benin Empire.
“In Africa, religion is a business in which they sell God.” – Prof. Bayyinah Bello
They don’t teach this in schools. Because King Leopold II targeted Black people !!
Still, some Africans can’t stop supporting these fools because of religion. Useless fool.
No African should be considered a foreigner on African soil. We dream of one united Africa with a single gold-backed currency, one strong military, and one shared language. Only through unity can we reclaim our dignity, wealth, and destiny.
“Africa must unite to avoid a new colonial scramble for Africa.” — President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa
As an African, you are part of the problem if you see nothing wrong with this: European and Asian countries have their own languages, teach everything in them, and use translators to interact, yet we argue over who is better at a foreign language.
Racism towards Eto’o, so he wants to leave the field. On February 25, 2006, football wasn’t just a game. It became a battlefield for dignity.
During a heated La Liga clash between Real Zaragoza and FC Barcelona, Samuel Eto’o endured what too many Black players know too well — monkey chants, bottles thrown from the stands, and relentless racist abuse.
This wasn’t the first time Zaragoza fans had targeted him. A small fine the year before had changed nothing.
By the 77th minute, Eto’o had reached his breaking point.
He grabbed defender Álvaro Mejía by the arm and pointed — a silent but piercing reminder: I am human. I am Black. I will not be mocked.
Then he shouted the words that echoed across the world:
“No más. No más. No más.”
“No more.”
He began walking off the pitch.
Teammates, referees, even coach Frank Rijkaard tried to calm him. But it was his friend Ronaldinho who stood tall and said:
“If he leaves, then I go as well.”
Barcelona won 2–0. But the score was irrelevant.
That day was about something bigger than football. It was about a Black athlete refusing to normalize humiliation. It was about drawing a line in front of thousands and saying: Enough.
The question remains:
Why does racism still echo in stadiums decades later?
And why are players still forced to choose between dignity and their careers?
Paul Robeson, African American singer and actor, lawyer and football player, political activist and Communist, was born 125 years ago today on 9 April 1898. Robeson was a masterful and prolific musician — he recorded almost 300 songs between 1925 and 1961, in 20 different languages, with a repertoire that included folk, blues and jazz standards, pop and musical pieces, classical as well as political songs. But he was also a vitally important champion in the struggle for black liberation. Until the onset of the Cold War he was, to quote W. E. B. Du Bois, “the best-known American on Earth” — and not only among Communists.
School, Studies, and First Professional Successes
Paul Leroy Bustill Robeson was born in Princeton, New Jersey in 1898 to a freed slave, Presbyterian preacher William Drew Robeson, and his wife Mary Louise, née Bastille, who died at an early age; he was the youngest of five children. In Westfield and Somerville, New Jersey, where Robeson lived after 1910, he excelled in all school subjects, including sports. In 1915 he won a nationwide academic competition for a scholarship to study at Rutgers University (then Rutgers College).
Robeson was a standout player in American football. He was twice selected to the nation’s top college amateur football team, but experienced racial discrimination even there — an opposing team refused to play because a black man was on the field. Robeson subsequently gave up a brief career in the National Football League in favour of his artistic ambitions, although he had experienced discrimination there too: Robeson, though blessed with an outstanding bass voice, was not allowed to become a member of the college choir.
Robeson completed his undergraduate studies with honours in 1919 and studied law at Columbia University. After graduating in 1923, he briefly worked in a law office; he happened to meet pianist Fletcher Henderson in Harlem who was looking for a new singer for his Four Kings of Harmony. After listening to several of Robeson’s songs, Henderson offered him a place in the quartet. It was also around that time that Robeson met his wife Eslanda Goode, whom he married in August 1921. From that point on, Eslanda worked as his agent in a partnership that was by no means free of tension. Paul Robeson Jr, the couple’s only child, was born in 1927.
Robeson was also offered an acting career. In April 1921, he played one of the title roles in Mary Hoyt Vyborg’s play Taboo; sang in the chorus of the Broadway production of Shuffle Along shortly afterward, and performed in England for the first time in 1922. It took until February 1924 for Robeson to be offered the title role in Eugene O’Neill’s Wings Are Given to All Children of Men, despite the racist agitation of the Hearst press. This was followed with the role of Brutus in O’Neill’s tragedy The Emperor Jones. In March 1925, Robeson recorded his first song, the spiritual “Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit.” Robeson’s first European tour followed. The recording of Jerome Kern’s “Ol’ Man River” brought him global success in 1928. This and other successes gave Robeson financial security for a long time.
Robeson’s Path to Communism
Robeson returned to London in 1930 to take the lead role in Shakespeare’s Othello. He took up part-time studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London in early 1934, majoring in Swahili. Sergei Eisenstein invited him to Moscow at the end of 1934 for his (unfinished) project to bring the Haitian Revolution to screen under the title “Black Majesty”. In contrast to Berlin, where he was harassed by an SA squad during a stopover, Robeson was impressed by Moscow. “In Russia, for the first time, I felt like a full human being,” he said after arriving. “No colour prejudice like in Mississippi; no colour prejudice like in Washington.”
Robeson’s experiences in the USSR were marked by the overwhelming feeling that, for the first time in his life, he was not discriminated against or excluded on the basis of his skin colour. This tragically led him to ignore the brutality of Joseph Stalin’s government. When commenting on an execution of persons who the Daily Worker, the paper of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), called “counterrevolutionary terrorists”, Robeson argued, “from what I have already seen of the workings of the Soviet Government, I can only say that anybody who lifts his hand against it ought to be shot.” He continued:
It is the government’s duty to put down any opposition to this really free society with a firm hand, and I hope they always will, for I already regard myself at home here … I feel more kinship to the Russian people under their new society than I have ever felt anywhere else. It is obvious that there is no terror here, that all the masses of every race are contended and support their government.
Robeson’s own family was eventually directly confronted with Stalin’s terror. In a 10 May 1936, interview, he described the apartment of his brother-in-law, John Goode, who was working in Moscow at this time. “While in the Soviet Union I made a point to visit some of the workers’ homes”, he said,
and I saw for myself. They all live in healthful surroundings, apartments with nurseries containing the most modern equipment for their children … I certainly wish the workers in this country — and especially the Negroes in Harlem and the South — had such places to stay in.
It did not occur to Robeson how atypical this was of the general housing situation in the Soviet Union. But just 21 months later, Robeson had to use his connections to help his brother-in-law, accused of terrorist conspiracy, to escape from Moscow; he therefore must have known how perilously people lived who did not have a famous advocate such as himself.
Robeson later revealed that his young son would be enrolled in school in Moscow, where he would not be discriminated against because of the colour of his skin. Paul Robeson Jr was accepted to an elite school whose students included Stalin’s daughter and Vyacheslav Molotov’s son. His father went back to London and appeared in films and plays of varying quality until he once again received highest recognition for his role of François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the Haitian Revolution. Robeson formed a close friendship with C. L. R. James, the author of The Black Jacobins, on which the play of the same name was based, which lasted until 1949.
The Spanish Civil War and its international repercussions finally turned Robeson into a political activist. With the beginning of the war in 1936, he sent proceeds from his concert performances to aid the Spanish Republic and performed there himself in 1938; Robeson in addition donated the proceeds of his concert performances to the strike funds of striking miners in Wales. After a meeting with Jawaharlal Nehru in June 1936, Robeson publicly advocated India’s independence and also supported anti-colonial efforts in Africa. On the occasion of his one-hundredth birthday in 1998, CPUSA secretary general Gus Hall revealed that Robeson had been a party member for decades, but had kept it a secret in consultation with the party leadership.
From World War II to the Cold War
Shortly after the beginning of World War II, the Robesons settled in Enfield, Connecticut. In July 1940, Robeson set out on a concert tour of the western parts of the United States, the highlight of which was to be a concert at the Hollywood Bowl. But none of the hotels contacted wanted to accept a black artist. He was finally forced to rent a room at an inflated price if he agreed not to eat his meals in the hotel’s restaurant.
Robeson contributed the voice of the narrator to the film Native Land, directed by Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand, which premiered in 1942. It was one of the first films to document civil rights violations in America. Despite the fact that the United States and the USSR were now allied and Communists in the US were temporarily in less danger, the FBI saw the film as covert Communist propaganda. Among Robeson’s barely countable activities of those years was a recording of the “March of the Volunteers” in both English and Chinese, which became the anthem of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. In 1943 Robeson was also a leader in the campaign to eliminate segregation in baseball leagues — still without success.
The war against fascism, in which black and white soldiers fought together in the US Army, put — not for the first time — the overdue question of equality for black people in the military on the agenda. It became urgent after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 in June 1941 that prohibited discrimination in the defence industry on the part of federal agencies.
Robeson appeared as an almost heroic representative of the ‘Other America’, not only to the Communists, but also to many independent leftists and left-liberals.
But the CPUSA, which until then had been committed advocates of black and white equality, curbed all campaigning for this cause after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, and especially after the US entry into the war the following December. If until then the party had supported a policy of strict defeatism and isolationism (“The Yanks are not coming!”), it now unconditionally supported US government policy, even at the cost of alienating the African American civil rights movement, for which the struggle against “racial segregation” was far from over.
On 25 July 1946, Robeson managed to talk to President Harry S. Truman, telling him that, if the federal government refused to defend its black citizens against lynchings, black people would have to defend themselves. The president assured Robeson that the United States and Britain were the best guarantors of a democratic society, to which Robeson replied that England was one of the greatest slave-holding nations in human history, while the practice of lynching in the contemporary United States reminded him of the worst of European fascism. American and British policy today, Robeson argued, would not support anti-fascism. Truman declared that this was not the time to introduce legislation against lynching. Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois, the legendary cofounder of the African American civil rights movement, then started a campaign on 22 September 1946, the day on which President Abraham Lincoln had officially declared slavery abolished in 1862.
That same year, 1946, Robeson was summoned to appear before the so-called Tenney Committee, the California subcommittee of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). There, and likewise in May 1948 before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he refused to answer questions about his CP membership, citing the Constitution. In 1948 he, along with Albert Einstein, also actively supported the presidential candidacy of Henry A. Wallace, chairman of the newly formed and short-lived Progressive Party. Wallace refused to exclude Communists from his party. He was fiercely attacked in the election campaign by the two anti-Communist camps, with the Democrats around Truman and the Republicans around Thomas E. Dewey, but also by Norman Thomas, the candidate of the Socialist Party of America. Wallace stood no chance against the victorious Truman.
Jackie Robinson, the best African American baseball player of his time, whose successful integration into white professional baseball was championed by Robeson, was compelled to appear before HUAC on 18 June 1949, to answer the question of whether he knew that Robeson was a Communist. He replied somewhat ambiguously that, if so, it would not be a reason to deprive Robeson of his constitutional right to refuse to testify. Robeson himself repeatedly declared, for example, at the Paris World Peace Congress in 1949, that African Americans, deprived of civil rights by their own country, would never go to war against the Soviet Union, in which the dignity and equality of all people were guaranteed. Robeson called Gerhart Eisler’s escape in May 1949, evading prosecution after his interrogation by HUAC, “the greatest victory for the forces of peace in the world”. His former friend Max Yergan, who had become a fanatical anti-Communist, now labelled him a “black Stalin”.
But Robeson appeared as an almost heroic representative of the “Other America”, not only to the Communists, but also to many independent leftists and left-liberals.
Robeson’s son, Paul Jr., maintained until his death that the CIA poisoned his father, causing his suicide attempt.
This rare, nearly 2-hour interview with Bob Kincaid of the Head ON Radio Network (H.O.R.N.) features author Joe Bageant in a relaxed, rambling conversation with Bob, touching on subjects ranging from the class and culture wars in the US to life among the Garifuna in Belize. From May 30, 2007, just ahead of Bageant’s widely acclaimed and successful first book, Deer Hunting with Jesus.
Paul Haeder, Author 