The revolution has failed. Fascism has temporarily succeeded under the guise of reform. The only way we can destroy it is to refuse to compromise with the enemy state and its ruling class.

George Jackson, born on this day in 1941, was the revolutionary author of “Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson” and co-founder of the Marxist-Leninist Black Guerilla Family.

In 1970, Jackson was charged, along with two other Soledad Brothers, with the murder of prison guard John Vincent Mills in the aftermath of a prison fight. The same year, he published “Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson”, a combination of autobiography and manifesto addressed to a black American audience. The book became a bestseller and earned Jackson personal fame.

Jackson was killed during an attempted prison escape on August 21st, 1971. Quoting communist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh, Jackson freed twenty-six prisoners and took hostages at gunpoint. Jackson and five other men were killed.

Fay Stender, George Jackson’s former lawyer, was shot and paralyzed for her alleged betrayal of Jackson by Black Guerilla Family member Edward Glenn Brooks. Brooks entered her home, tied up her family, and forced Stender to say “I, Fay Stender, admit I betrayed George Jackson and the prison movement when they needed me most” before shooting her several times. Left paralyzed and in chronic pain, Stender testified against Brooks and committed suicide a year later.

“Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”

George Jackson

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  • HarryLime [any]@hexbear.net
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    4 hours ago

    Going to articulate something that bothers me about a fairly obscure topic:

    The topic of Vinland and Markland and Viking colonization of North America is obviously interesting, and it’s obviously fun to think about alternate history scenarios where these projects survived and the trade exchange between Eurasia and the Americas started centuries earlier. But I’m annoyed that seemingly everyone who tries to come up with an alternate history for Vinland has unthinkingly white supremacist assumptions about how that would logically go. You always see like a map of North America with Vinland dominating it as the major state, or like a scenario with the modern states of the US and Canada but with Vinland in Newfoundland and Maine or something. No one actually gets what would be the logical and more interesting outcome of a surviving Vinland colonization project- it would kill any larger European colonization of the Americas before it was even an idea. A surviving Vinland and Markland would be two small, culturally Nordic states in Newfoundland or Nova Scotia or wherever, probably with ethnically-mixed populations, while the Americas would be divided between large Native American states with no other substantial European presence. Starting the trade exchanges with the Americas hundreds of years earlier, before European states were developed enough to expand and colonize beyond Europe, would mean that the Native Americans get earlier exposure to Eurasian technology (most importantly metallurgy), diseases, and domesticated animals, with no threat of a large wave of colonizers to overtake them. No one seems to want to write that history, and they don’t seem able to imagine it.

    • ComradeMonotreme [she/her, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      4 minutes ago

      The earlier introduction of diseases as you mentioned would have been a big deal too, as the First Nations could have bounced back a bit more with extra time.

      I think it would be also interesting (not automatically good) as they’ve discussed on “We’re Not So Different” if there had been a Chinese colonial project on the West Coast, because had they not stopped making their large ships and focused inwards, the Chinese could have certainly reached the West coast of North America and Central America.

      So imagine you’ve got the unique Vinland up in the Northeast and Chinese settlements down as far as what we call California now, by the time Anglos try to colonise the Eastern side of North America, with the First Nations having access to all of those things mentioned like weapons, horses, disease etc. Plus various political alliances and treaties.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 hours ago

      The vikings would absolutely intermarry with anyone who was interested and half of Europe would end up with some amount of indigenous ancestry by 1492.