Walter Rodney, born in Guyana on this day in 1942, Pan-African, Marxist intellectual who was assassinated by the Guyanese government in 1980 at 38 years old.
Rodney attended the University College of the West Indies in 1960 and was awarded a first class honors degree in History in 1963. He later earned a PhD in African History in 1966 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England, at the age of 24.
Rodney traveled extensively and became well-known as an activist, scholar, and formidable orator. He taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania from 1966-67 and 1969-1974, and in 1968 at his alma mater University of the West Indies.
On October 15th, 1968, the government of Jamaica declared Rodney a “persona non grata” and banned him from the country. Following his dismissal by the University of the West Indies, students and poor people in West Kingston protested, leading to the “Rodney Riots”, which caused six deaths and millions of dollars in damages.
In 1972, Rodney published “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”. Historian Melissa Turner describes the work this way: “A brutal critique of long-standing and persistent exploitation of Africa by Western powers, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a powerful, popular, and controversial work in which Rodney argued that the early period of African contact with Europe, including the slave trade, sowed the seeds for continued African economic underdevelopment and had dramatically negative social and political consequences as well. He argued that, while the roots of Africa’s ailments rested with intentional underdevelopment and exploitation under European capitalist and colonial systems, the only way for true liberation to take place was for Africans to become cognizant of their own complicity in this exploitation and to take back the power they gave up to the exploiters.”
On June 13th, 1980, Rodney was killed in Georgetown, Guyana via a bomb given to him by Gregory Smith, a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force, one month after returning Zimbabwe. In 2015, a “Commission of Inquiry” in Guyana that the country’s then president, Linden Forbes Burnham, was complicit in his murder.
“If there is to be any proving of our humanity it must be through revolutionary means.”
- Walter Rodney
I hope you nerds have a great March. 
Remember no crackers
oMG that’s So aNtIsEpTic OF yOuuuuuUU
/s
“Curse the Jews” is blatantly antisemitic unironically. I get where they are coming from, given their history, but there are jews opposed to zionism and israel. I don’t wish a curse upon them.
Ansarallah is based, but that doesn’t put them beyond criticism.
Or am I misunderstanding that line somehow?
Saying “curse upon the Jews” (even in its most uncharitable interpretation) is antisemitic has the same level of rhetorical weight as claiming reverse racism exists.
Israel makes up 46% of the worlds identified Jews according to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (Zionist think tank), the second largest population is in the US and then Europe. Modern Orthodox (the proud boys style Zionist Judaism) is rising.
Claiming that antisemitism still continues to exist as a form of oppression only operates on both the Zionist holocaust industry (from Norman Finkelstein) and the population basis that Jews are a minority. Neither are more compelling than the interpretation that Jews have been subsumed into white supremacy in the same ways previously non white identities were in that they serve to bolster whiteness.
If a Jewish person feels threatened by this phrase then it has served its intended effect which is to break the taboo of not rejecting Jewish expectionalism and recycling of compromised (Zionists are the largest backers of holocaust memorials) cultural memories of the holocaust. More whities know about the holocaust than they do about chattel slavery or the many, many other systematic mass killings of non-whites in history (which includes the genocide of Palestine, since AI is more efficient than gas chambers).
The line was originally shouted by Hussein al-Houthi after he witnessed the footage of the murder of 12 yo palestinian child Muhammad al-Durrah during the beggining of the second intifada back in 2000. It has been the motto of the resistance officially since 2003 and it’s not colonized people’s faults that judaism as a whole has been absorved into western imperialism much like christianity has been nor do genocide and occupation victims have to mince their words about their oppressors but to quote a muslim comrade who said it better themselves when the whole debacle went down when white users co-opted a thread about a murdered iranian toddler to cry about how colonized people’s words that have been used for well over two decades now make them uncomfortable:
"“Al Sarkha” or “the collective outcry” from Ansar Allah was modeled after revolutionary Iran and adopted in 2003, right after POTUS Bush Junior’s invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the Palestinian second intifada. The line “Curse upon the the Jews” has drawn ire from international audiences for being antisemitic.
It is not antisemitic because antisemitism no longer exists as a form of SYSTEMIC oppression. Judaism has been subsumed by the white supremacist settler class system as Christianity has been. Jews are not a race nor are they an ethnicity and to say so is to directly support Israel’s myth of existence which is predicated on the revisionist history of Judaism as well as the centrality of the European Jewish experience above all others.
To do politeness finger wagging to a people who have suffered genocide at the hands of Jewish settlers, US imperialists and gulf compradors is an insult to their intelligence and to their humanity.
Incredible how we are on a thread detailing the murder of an innocent baby girl with her grandfather and all you can think about is how a Jewish person’s feelings might be hurt." credit to @hello_hello@hexbear.net
Its the “burning the israeli flag is antisemetic cause it has the star of david” discourse all over again. It’s not arabs’ fault jews suffered oppression under europeans but it is not oppressed people’s responsibility to cater to their oppressors feelings especially in the imperial core. I’m sure there’s some good white people or USians or insert anything else opposed to genocide and colonialism under their name but that doesn’t and will not stop those under their boot from cursing them nor should it. Nor should it once again change the focus of dead poc to mostly white feelings as it tends to do.
Sorry if I sound snarky/angry it’s not directed at you nor my intention nor am I accusing you of anything just trying to explain tho I just woke up.
This was the child in question being shielded by his father. Both would die moments later shredded by IOF fire. Sending cause this footage went massively viral at the time from what I gather (I was an infant so I don’t have memory of it obviously) but even people who don’t know the name usually can recognize the pic/videos due to how infamous they became. Nothing’s changed as we sadly know tho. This and countless other millions is why the collective cry was born and why the oppressed will keep shouting it until israel no longer exists.
EDIT: To note there is a VERY big universe of difference behind a european cracker cursing the jews vs an arab living under jewish occupation and they’re not at all the same thing, to compare them would be intellectually dishonest as all hell.
Yeah, this definitely is different from a white person shouting the same, I agree on that.